Streaming movie rentals are seen by many consumers and movie rental firms to be the future of movie rentals. The problem is that many movie studios and large rental chains like Blockbuster are slow to support online rentals for fear of hurting their retail rental and sales business.

Blockbuster and Sonic solutions announced this week that they would be working together on a new digital movie service. Sonic will provide the software part for delivering movie content across PCs and consumer electronics devices.

Digeo, a developer of cable set top boxes, rolled out officially at CES this week its new Moxi HD DVR. This non-subscription fee competitor to TiVo costs around $800.

The Digeo Moxi HD DVR sports a 500GB hard drive which Digeo says can hold up to 75 hours of recordings at full 1080 resolution. It sports an award-winning menu system which is designed to let users easily find TV programs and movies as well as photos, music, games and other Internet services.

Some of you probably know Faith Japan, the famous store in Akihabara. They recently introduced the Fortission Q96500XN DVR-4S, which is a desktop computer that boots up in just four seconds thanks to it’s S3 Instant Boot mode.

The ultra fast booter is powered by a Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU with a P45TS Intel motherboard, 2GB of DDR2, 500GB of SATA II HDD, and nVidia GeForce with 512MB of VRAM. The Fortission Q96500XN DVR-4S retails for 119,800 Yen in Akihabara, or you can purchase it online in Japan for around €990.

There are times when I want to watch something on the Internet, but I don’t want to sit in front of my PC to do it. I have a nice 50-inch plasma in the living room, and that is where I want to watch programs, not on my computer.

SageTV has announced a new HD Theater product that allows for viewing Internet content on your HDTV in full 1080p. The gadget requires no computer for sites like YouTube and other popular online video services.

Netflix streaming has made it’s way into everything and people like it. As usual, Blockbuster is behind. But here’s some good news for the company.

According to Chairman Jim Keyes, Blockbuster’s download-to-rent service in a Blu-ray player will be here by Q1 of next year. Basically, if you’re an HD film fan then you’ll be able to rent HD quality films from Blockbuster directly through your Blu-ray Disc machine. No word if this will be in the form of a firmware update for existing hardware or part of a new player, but it’ll need to standout a bit and lower the price in order to compete with Netflix.

There’s few things better than owning a piece of technology or gadget that keeps on giving, and TiVo is turning out to be one of those devices with it’s latest beta release of a mobile website to control your TiVo box. This adds to the devices core ability to act as a DVR, and the company has also recently introduced features to order pizza, stream Netflix content and watch YouTube videos.

TiVo says the new mobile site at m.tivo.com will allow users, subscribers or not, to browse television listings and search for shows. The online app will also will recommend other television shows based on what you are viewing. The site is available to anyone that has access to the internet through a mobile browser, and no installation on the mobile device is necessary.

Online movie rentals are one of the most convenient ways for movie fans to get their favorite films without leaving the house. The catch is that many of the newest releases aren’t available for streaming rentals. Netflix offers a streaming on demand library of 12,000 movies and TV shows to its subscribers.

Several hardware devices will allow Netflix members to access the streaming content including the Xbox 360 and some DVD players. Netflix and TiVo announced today that TiVo DVR subscribers would be able to access the streaming content library over certain TiVo DVRs.

No one can deny that Apple’s iTunes store is seriously popular. The store is the single largest music retailer and has one of the largest collections of music available. The App store is wildly popular and the iTunes movie rental, sale, and TV show market is booming. It seems that Apple can’t do wrong with iTunes.

In fact, Apple has announced that it has now sold over 200 million TV show episodes via iTunes. Apple also says that over 1 million of those shows sold have been in HD resolution. Major networks all contribute programs to the iTunes store including FOX, CBS, ABC, and CBS.

The DVR has been the best thing to happen to TV since programming went color. Before the DVR, we had to record shows with a DVD recorder or even worse — a VCR. Anyone who has tried to program a VCR to record a show that isn’t on yet will recall the anxiety. The DVR came along and made recording programs as easy as clicking a button and one of the pioneers in the DVR realm was TiVo.

Nero and TiVo announced that they have teamed up for a new software and hardware product called Nero LiquidTV | TiVo PC. The product allows users to record TV programs on their PC with typical DVR ease as well as pause and rewind programs. Once TV programs are recorded, the shows can be exported to PSP, iPod or DVD automatically.

The SlingBox was one of the first time and place shifting devices that would send programs from the TV to the PC. The interesting device let users shoot their favorite programs to the PC for viewing and recording in DVR-like fashion.

Back at CES in January, we talked a bit about the PRO-HD SlingBox that was unveiled. Sling Media announced today that the PRO-HD is finally shipping. Yeah, it took long enough for Sling Media to actually ship the device, which isn’t so cool.

I am a big time DVR fan; I don’t know what I did before I had DVRs on each TV in the house. Before the DVR, I actually had to watch commercials. If my wife wanted to watch something that really sucked, like one of those wedding shows, I missed something good (like anything not a wedding show).

Thankfully, the DVR saved me from having to program my VCR and enduring crap TV and commercials. According to a survey from NDS, 7 out of 10 people who own a DVR, say they can’t live without it. The survey also shows that 89% of Americans say that a DVR makes for a happier home life. I agree with that, the other guys out there don’t like wedding shows either I am betting.

Hard drive capacities are growing all the time, which is great news for computer users with lots of stuff to store. More storage capacity is also great news for DVR users looking to be able to record more programming before their hard drive fills up.

Today Hitachi announced a pair of new hard drives in its CinemaStar line. The flagship product is the CinemaStar 7K1000.B with up to 1TB of storage space. Hitachi previously announced a 1TB desktop drive a few weeks back. Other capacities are available for the 7K1000.B in addition to the 1TB version. Hitachi also announced the CinemaStar 5K320 with 320GB of storage space. The 1TB drive can store 247 hours of MPEG-4 HD video.

Samsung this week began showcasing a new extender for Windows Media Center which looks decidedly more stylish than similar products on the market. It is called the Samsung MediaLive and to get one you’ll have to cough up around $200.

The Samsung MediaLive lets you stream either wired or wirelessly, including HD content, from a PC equipped with Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate. It is designed to be paired with most 2008-model Samsung HDTVs, though I imagine you can use it with most any teleivsion which has the correct A/V inputs and HD support.

TiVo and YouTube, which announced plans earlier this year to unleash YouTube videos on TiVo set top boxes, made good on that promise today by kicking off said service. Get ready TiVo subscribers – YouTube videos of cheap dog tricks and people’s virtual diaries are coming your way.

TiVo and YouTube specifically said this new partnership “allows broadband-connected subscribers with TiVo Series3and TiVo HD DVRs, to access hundreds of millions of user generated videos hosted on YouTube.” You’ll need a YouTube account to access this new TiVo feature, which will be made available when a new TiVo box software upgrade is rolled out.

AMD is going all high-def with a new PC graphics card attached to the ATI brand. It is called the ATI All-In-Wonder HD and you’ll find the price of it set around $200.

The ATI All-In-Wonder HD combines Radeon graphics and Wonder HD tuner technology into one PCI Express 2.0 card. Key features of this new card include HDTV DVR functionality, unified video decoder technology and Windows Vista certification.