It just keeps getting better for consumers looking for on-demand set top boxes. In response to the new firmware upgrade and price drop announced by Jobs for the Apple TV, Vudu has given its own demand box a 25 percent discount. This brings the price of the Vudu system down to $295 from $399.

Apple recently discounted the Apple TV with prices as low as $229 for the 40GB model and they’ve also are scheduled to move into a space where Vudu had an upper hand - movie downloads without a PC. Apple TV not only is going to match that point of service but can also bring in YouTube videos AND content from your computer into your living room, which Vudu cannot.

CBS announced on Wednesday that its Last.fm internet radio service will be adding a new feature that will allow users to listen to any song they would like, whenever they would like for free, up to three times per song.

Up until now Last.fm’s model has been similar to many other internet radio services. The 20 million currently active users can select a genre “station” to listen to and hear the music in the order that the service streamed it out, along with advertising in between. CBS and Last.fm is building on this model since the service is free to users and paid for by the advertising, much like tradition radio. This new option gives users the change to select a particular song and listen to it as many as three times, on-demand.

Samsung is showing off its new line of LCD monitors this week at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. The 2693HM and 2493HM monitors are part of the new Samsung SyncMaster lineup, providing 1920 x 1200 resolution displays with built-in speakers and a 5ms GTG response time.

The SyncMaster 2493HM is a 24-inch display while the 2693HM is not quite a 26-inch measuring 25.5 inches diagonally. Both monitors have HDMI inputs and feature full 1080p to take advantage of those downloaded HD movies until you get an appliance to transfer them into your living room. The built-in speakers might not provide the same quality that you might get from stand-alones but the space on your desk that’s saved is often worth it.

Amidst the new product announcements unveiled during the MacWorld 2008 keynote today Jobs slipped in a message about a new feature that will easily get your DVD content into your iTunes or Windows Media Player library called Digital Copy. Partnering with Twentieth Century Fox, Apple is offering the Digital Copy feature on DVDs from the Fox studio starting with “Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest” which releases today.

Anytime someone purchases a DVD from Fox that has the Digital Copy feature they can insert the disc into their computer, enter a unique code and transfer the movie into iTunes or Windows Media Player. The movie will then be available for unlimited viewing on their computer, iPod with video, iPhone, Apple TV or other video media player. There is of course some restriction on your purchased DVD’s Digital Copy feature however. It will transfer the DVD to only one instance of iTunes, limited by the unique code required.

Apple announced the immediate launch of iTunes Movie Rentals today during the MacWorld 2008 keynote speech, allowing iTunes users to get limited-time download of movies from any of the major studios for as little as $2.99. The new service is part of iTunes version 7.6 which is available now and gives a rental download of movies for 30 days, but once you begin watching the movie the rental will run out in 24 hours. It can be watched as many times as you would like within that time. You can even start watching on your computer and then transfer the video to your iPod and finish watching the movie on the go.

Apple appears to have picked up all the major studios with this offer with the list of participants including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema. iTunes plans to have over 1,000 titles available by the end of February with rates of $2.99 for regular titles and $3.99 for new releases. For another dollar iTunes will deliver titles in high-def with Dolby 5.1 surround.

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, Steve Jobs is going to deliver the keynote speech for MacWorld 2008 today in San Francisco at 9am PST/12pm EST. Apple usually reserves this time to make its biggest announcements of the year in which they usually do a pretty good job of keeping under wraps until this time. As usual there are a number of rumors floating around with the more prominent that we know of being an SDK for the iPhone, movie rentals on iTunes and some type of super-portable MacBook. None of this we know for sure but we’re going to find out shortly after 9 this morning and pass it on.

Sony pushed out a couple of new HD radios last week at the annual CES event for those audiophiles wanting some high fidelity sound without the subscription costs of satellite radio. The XDR-S10HDiP HD Radio (pictured bottom) is a tabletop type player that comes ready to go with speakers and an iPod dock on top. The XDR-F1HD Tuner (pictured top) is component HD tuner that can connect and bring HD radio to your existing home theater system.

Both systems will pick up over 1,500 nationwide HD radio stations and will also bring in regular FM and AM signals. The XDR-S10HDiP is the first of this type of HD radio from Sony and features the ability to dock and charge an iPod when connected. While listening to HD radio the iPod owners can also use the iTunes Tagging which lets you mark songs you like playing on the radio and save the titles in your iPod. The next time you sync your iPod with iTunes, it will find those songs and prompt you with the option to buy them. The tabletop player also comes with a wireless remote that not only controls the radio but also controls the iPod when docked.

Netflix online movie rental service is showing that they are not going to be left behind as online digital video content continues to evolve with an announcement on Monday that they are offering unlimited streaming videos to their unlimited rental customers. Subscribers with a minimum $8.99 per month account can take advantage of more than 90,000 DVD titles streamed to their PC for no additional cost and no limit.

Netflix shook up the video rental industry when it launched back in 1998 as the first internet store to offer DVD rentals which had a flat monthly fee and only limited by the number of videos a customer could possess at a time. This new offer extends the unlimited video content to customer’s PCs, which was previously limited to an hour of content per month for each dollar spent on a monthly subscription through the Watch Now program. Lower, $4.99 per month subscribers can get still get two hours of streaming video per month with the new offer.

Just before the close of 2007 Warner Music Group joined EMI and Universal by dropping their digital copying restrictions on downloaded songs and offering DRM-free music through Amazon. Today Sony BMG, the last of the big four and the second largest music company in the world, has joined in and removed copying restrictions on their downloaded music and are offering their songs through Amazon as well. This makes Amazon the first online retailer to offer DRM-free song downloads from the world’s four largest music companies.

DRM’s previously had been required by these large music companies in order to prevent songs from being illegally copied which was believed to hurt overall music sales. The DRM would often limit the number of times and devices a song could be copied, such as a limited number of computers or a particular brand of MP3 player. Most consumers and rival media players manufacturers have been generally apposed to the restrictions due to these limitations.

I bring you more CES 2008 goodness. The On Time 200ID lets you wake up to your iPod, iPhone, radio, or a simple buzzer. If you want to connect other devices, it also has a 1/8th-inch line input. The one-piece speaker has a backlit LCD as well as touch-sensitive controls, and a backup battery to preserve your settings if power is interrupted.

The On Time 400IHD is pretty similar, but adds dual alarms and an HD Radio receiver for picking up HD stations. It also supports iTunes tagging; just press a button when you hear something you like, and when you sync your iPod in iTunes, it will let you find and buy it quickly.

D-Link has a new networking product that they are unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, boasting the ability to bring videos, movies and photos wirelessly from a PC to a television or projector, getting your online video content into your living room. The D-Link PC-on-TV (DPG-1200) receiver connects to your television through composite or component cable connections and streams content from your PC through WiFi.

The press release from D-Link talks about using the system to stream media content to your television which is the most likely use for many people, and says it is media player-independent, allowing viewing of just about any media player that plays on your PC like YouTube, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. You can also view an internet browser or play some online games through the system and navigate the display with an included remote control and trackball. Our interpretation of this is that the device really does what the name says: “PC-on-TV”. The ability to play media and view photos on your television is a big part but seems to be focused on for marketing purposes.

Warner Music Group announced on Thursday that it would join the ranks of EMI Group and Universal Music Group as the third of the four large music labels to offer their digital music titles for sale without any type of copy protection software. Warner will offer its catalog through Amazon in the common MP3 formats that are free to copy to any player or computer, any number of times.

This move comes after Warner Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. defended DRMs at the 3GSM World Conference in Barcelona in February, stressing the importance of interoperability over DRM restrictions likely due to Apple’s DRM through iTunes which restricts music files to be played only on Apple devices.

According to the Financial Times, Apple is finally getting ready to announce a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to offer Fox movies available for download through iTunes. The service would allow users to download Fox movies as a temporary digital “rental”. According to the source Fox is also working out a feature on their physical DVD movies that would let DVD owners temporarily transfer the movie content from the DVD to a digital player like an iPod or a computer using Apple’s DRM.

This is something that Apple has been trying to get going for a while but has met some resistance with most studios, likely for fear of losing sales due to a higher piracy rate of movies and lower costs of ownership. Another issue is the threat that this poses to video on demand services from places such as Comcast and DirectTV. Apple currently sells some movie titles on iTunes from Disney and Viacom but has not had as much luck getting the ball rolling with video as it has with online music purchases, which more that likely has led to a rental offering.

Our favorite Hedgehog is back. Sega’s 16-bit classic game has now made its way onto the iPod games section of iTunes. It will only cost you $4.99. It’s interesting to note that the Wii version of the title is nearly twice as much at 800 Wii points. That’s $8.

Just use the circular iPod touch wheel as a four-way d-pad, the center button takes place of the original ABC buttons from the Genesis controller. I imagine it takes some getting used to but should suffice. According to Crave however, in the later bonus levels, it doesn’t fair so well. For the $4 price tag, they even threw in some extras. Like being able to turn off the soundtrack and replace it with your own, while keeping some of the sound effects.

If you were looking to take advantage of, or get taken advantage of depending on how you look at it, the very expensive deal T-Mobile was offering for unlocked iPhones in Germany you’re now too late. A German court has ruled that T-Mobile can indeed be the exclusive operator for Apple’s popular handset in Germany by ruling against a complaint filed by Vodafone.

Apple had planned to launch the iPhone in Germany with T-Mobile being the exclusive carrier much as it did in the United States, however Vodafone filed a complaint stating that the exclusivity went against German laws to protect consumers. The complaint resulted in a temporary injunction against T-Mobile requiring them to offer the iPhones unlocked and able to connect to other operators including Vodafone. T-Mobile complied with the injunction but offered the normally $580 iPhone in an unlocked state for $1460. Despite the high price Klaus Czerwinski of T-Mobile told ZDNet UK that there were still “many sold.”