Marseille Networks, a fabless semiconductor company in Santa Clara, CA, that designs video processing chips, said today that has closed a $4.5 million Series B funding round with participation from new and existing investors including Kumpulan Modal Perdana Sdn Bhd. The company says its “Virtual Silicon” rapid prototyping platform makes chip design faster for builders of consumer electronics devices.

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If you’re seeing electronic displays on every wall, window, billboard, and passing dirigible, it’s a sure sign that you’re stuck in a science-fiction movie. While a few real-world destinations like New York’s Times Square and Tokyo’s Ginza district are plastered with outdoor displays, such technology is still too expensive and electricity-hogging to put everywhere.

But this might not be true forever. In fact, Prysm, a San Jose, CA, startup that came out of stealth mode yesterday, is working to ease the biggest limitations on large-screen displays, especially their power requirements. The company says that screens using its new laser phosphor display (LPD) technology suck up only one-quarter as much electricity as screens using today’s dominant liquid-crystal display (LCD) or light-emitting diode (LED) technologies.

Moreover, Prysm’s LPD screens—which the startup plans to manufacture at a plant in Concord, MA—can be built in any size or shape, from square tiles to long, thin ribbons, meaning they could turn up almost anywhere someone wants to convey information or advertising, day or night. “We can make it as big and bright as you can imagine,” says Roger Hajjar, Prysm’s co-founder and chief technology officer and the primary inventor of the company’s LPD technology. “That’s the goodness here—the size and brightness are scalable. If you need more brightness, you just add more laser power.”

Hajjar and Prysm CEO Amit Jain, who have been friends since their undergraduate days at Boston University, co-founded the startup under the stealth name Spudnik back in 2005, with venture funding from Artiman Ventures of East Palo Alto, CA, and Partech International of San Francisco. Hajjar says large LPD-based screens—which actually have more in common with old-fashioned cathode ray tubes (CRTs) than they do with LCDs—became practical for the first time in the 2000s thanks to the development of new phosphor materials by the LED industry and the increasing power and efficiency (and declining cost) of laser-light sources. Unlike many hardware startups, Prysm won’t merely license the intellectual property it has developed to other equipment makers, but plans to manufacture and sell LPD products under its own brand.

The company isn’t saying yet exactly which applications or markets it will pursue first, and it’s only showing off its prototype displays in private, invitation-only settings such as a booth at the Integrated Systems Europe audio-video trade show in Amsterdam next month. But a glimpse at the Prysm website shows where the company’s thoughts are heading. In Prysm’s glossy version of the future, LPDs will light up theaters, casinos, trade shows, stadiums, shopping malls, broadcast studios, train stations, airports, command centers, financial exchanges, hotel lobbies, museums, even churches.

LPD screens may initially cost more to install than LCD or LED screens, but Prysm vice president of sales and marketing Dana Corey says they’ll cost far less to operate, since they use less power and … Next Page »

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Acton, MA-based SeaChange International (NASDAQ: SEAC), which specializes in hardware and software for video-on-demand television, announced last week that it has acquired VividLogic of Fremont, CA, for $12 million in cash plus $8.6 million in working capital. VividLogic supplies software for home video networking and recording to cable operators, set-top box makers, and consumer electronics firms, and SeaChange said the acquisition will help it capitalize on growing interest in Internet-based video delivery to the home. SeaChange said it will owe VividLogic shareholders an additional $1 million on each of the first three anniversaries of the acquisition.

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

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If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the … Next Page »

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San Diego-based home entertainment semiconductor manufacturer Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR) has cut approximately 55 employees, or 18 percent of its workforce. In a filing with the SEC today, Entropic says its board approved a restructuring plan that closes offices in Nice, France, and Kfar Saba, Israel, “to better position the Company to operate in current market and financial conditions.” Entropic says it also suspended development of network processors in Israel.

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I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled … Next Page »

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Both traffic to online retailers and actual sales appear to have been up moderately on Cyber Monday, the Internet equivalent of last week’s Black Friday bricks-and-mortar shopping binge. But it wasn’t because of the big discounts allegedly being offered by e-retailers as a way to get recession-stung consumers to open their wallets, according to an analysis by David Parker, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based DigitalAdvisor.

In fact, the average discounts on popular consumer electronics products—as tabulated by BeatThat, a comparison shopping site owned by DigitalAdvisor—have been unexpectedly small this season, Parker reported in a post on his company’s blog yesterday.

I wrote about BeatThat back in August, shortly after the site emerged from beta testing. The site’s shtick is that it offers a $2 cash reward to any user who finds a product listed on the Web for less money than the lowest price currently listed on BeatThat. The reward creates “an incentive for the deals to keep coming in until, quite frankly, you just can’t find a better one,” Parker told me back then. His blog post yesterday, while certainly aimed at highlighting BeatThat’s ability to find the rare steep discount, also underscores the site’s function as a kind of barometer of the e-retailing scene.

“The press is full of articles and newscasts saying that retailers and manufacturers have slashed prices this holiday season,” Parker writes. “An analysis of the lowest prices on hundreds of popular consumer electronics products by BeatThat.com, however, reveals that prices have fallen on average a small amount—and that the biggest discounts are on specific models only.”

Parker’s post shares some specific numbers for the main product categories tracked at BeatThat. Between August 1 and November 30, the average percentage price drops were as follows:

GPS devices: 18.9%
MP3 Players: 14.1%
Camcorders: 12.6%
Digital Cameras: 11.2%
TVs: 6.9%
Printers: 5.6%
Average for all six Categories: 7.6%

Parker calls those numbers “interesting, but not what we at BeatThat expected, particularly given all the press lately about huge discounts. TVs only down 7 percent?”

Parker also dug through BeatThat’s data to see which categories retailers are discounting most often. He found that 32 percent of GPS devices were lowered in price by 25 percent or more between August 1 and November 30; 31 percent of MP3 players; 12 percent of digital cameras; 11 percent of printers; 5 percent of camcorders; and just 4 percent of TVs.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday didn’t bring any big improvements, Parker says. Between November 20 and November 30, only 17 percent of GPS devices and printers were marked down by 10 percent or more; only 8 percent of MP3 players, digital cameras and TVs; and only 3 percent of camcorders.

The basic message, according to Parker: the dominant strategy for electronics retailers this season has not been to offer widespread discounts, but to mark down and heavily advertise a few selected items as a way to get shoppers in the door (or onto the website). “Overall, prices were essentially flat,” Parker writes. “A classic case of the ‘squeaky wheel’—a small number of products that fell in price got a lot of attention.”

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Boston’s Spark Capital and New York’s Union Square Ventures have put $2 million each into Boxee, a New York-based startup working on “social media center” software that optimizes Internet TV shows, music, and photos for consumption on high-definition TVs, Spark announced Tuesday. Spark’s Bijan Sabet and Union Square’s Fred Wilson will join the board of Boxee, which has not yet released its software to the public.

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There’s a new development in the saga of ZeeVee, the Littleton, MA, startup that makes a “localcasting” PC-to-HDTV appliance called the ZvBox. It’s taking the best part of its appliance—an elegant user interface that aggregates video from across the Internet—and making it available to all Windows computer users over the Web.

The newly liberated “ZViewer” functions as a kind of Internet equivalent of TiVo, but without the recording function. In other words, it provides a simple, attractive interface that you can easily manipulate even if you’re sitting 10 feet away from your TV screen. It also lets you subscribe to your favorite TV shows, then alerts you when new episodes are available online, even if they’re at disparate sites like Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, or the TV network sites.

It’s an interesting move for ZeeVee, which has had trouble working the kinks out of its primary product, the ZvBox itself. The device is designed to enable living-room viewing of Internet video, by taking the video signal from your PC—even if it’s located in your den or your basement—and piping it over the coaxial cables inside your walls to your HDTV. I greeted that idea enthusiastically in my May story about the company’s debut, but then panned the actual hardware after I had a chance to test it out in September.

I concluded, after running into one technical snafu after another, that the ZvBox needs some reengineering before average consumers will have a shot at making it work with their existing computer and video equipment. Indeed, when I spoke yesterday with ZeeVee co-founder and CEO Vic Odryna, he called my review “pretty well right on” and said that the company has “spent a lot of time addressing” the kinds of compatibility issues I encountered. ZeeVee will be coming out with “some pretty significant improvements” to the ZvBox by year’s end, Odryna said.

That’s something to look forward to. But meanwhile, the company is going Web-wide with the one part of the ZvBox system that it clearly got right—the Zviewer software, which I described in my review as “by far the coolest thing about ZvBox.” You can sign up to try the beta version of the software on your Windows computer here; it’s an 18.5-megabyte download that works with Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

If you connect your desktop or laptop PC to your HDTV through a VGA cable, you can then use the Zviewer screen as a convenient clearinghouse for free Internet video from sites like Hulu, YouTube, ABC.com, CNN.com, MTV, Joost, and Miro, as well as paid on-demand video from iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon. There’s also a “local content” tab that shows you thumbnails of videos stored on your computer. Once you select a video to watch, Zviewer sends you directly to that video’s home site or application.

You can operate Zviewer directly from your computer (for that matter, you don’t even have to hook up your PC to a TV to use it—it provides a nice way to browse videos even if you’re sitting right at your computer). But it also responds to commands from any remote control that’s compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center software, or from ZeeVee’s own ZvRemote, which has a cool built-in track pad. (Right now you can only get the ZvRemote as part of the ZvBox package, but Odryna says the remote will be available for purchase separately by the end of this month.)

From a technical perspective, “this is really a way to put a 10-foot graphical user interface on existing Web video properties without having to rebuild those properties,” says Odryna. “Most media files can be described by a tile containing a thumbnail picture with a bit of information underneath—a title, the season and episode number, the length in minutes. It’s fairly easy to build a tile for every piece of content a website might have, and suck those in and present them in a unified way.”

ZeeVee has already created Zviewer tiles for prominent video sites like YouTube, ABC.com, and Hulu just by reformatting the information in their RSS feeds. Odryna says the company will soon publish the XML specifications for its tiles so that anyone who publishes video online can create a custom Zviewer button. “If you have a gardening website and you’ve got 40 videos, you can create a feed describing those and your videos will show up in the Zviewer” right alongside the latest episodes of Heroes or Desperate Housewives, he explains.

Why would ZeeVee give away the best part of the ZvBox experience to all comers? Contrary to what you might assume, the company isn’t out to sell advertising. “There’s nothing in our current plans” about monetizing the Zviewer service, Odryna says. “You won’t see ads littering it. Our goal is very simple—we believe the ZvBox creates a very unique way to bridge the Internet and the HDTVs in your house. The more people can get comfortable watching video on the Internet, the more likely our main business will succeed.”

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I really wish that I could write a positive review of the ZvBox—the appliance from Littleton, MA-based ZeeVee that taps into your house’s TV cables, allowing you to watch videos playing on your Windows PC from any high-definition TV in your house. When I first profiled ZeeVee back in May, I had high hopes for the device, which finally hit stores in early August. As you know if you’ve been reading this column regularly, I’m on the edge of giving up my home cable TV subscription, and a gadget like the ZvBox seemed to offer a perfect substitute: a way to get my favorite shows for free over the Internet but still be able to watch them on the big screen in my living room. On top of all that, the people at ZeeVee are super-nice: they went well beyond the call of duty as I was doing the research for this review, loaning me not only a review unit but the extra hardware I needed to make the system work (more on that below), and calmly fielding several panicked calls for assistance.

Alas, I can’t recommend this first version of the $499 ZvBox to the general home user. The company’s “localcasting” concept is great. But you can only expect the average consumer to cope with so many kinks, adjustments, workarounds, and other snafus—and the ZvBox just generates too many.

To be fair, most of the problems I ran into while testing the ZvBox are not technically ZeeVee’s fault. The issue, at its most basic, is that TVs are TVs, and computers are computers. They were not designed to interact. In most homes, they aren’t even in the same room—which means that connecting them is going to be a kludge, no matter how you slice it. And while the latest high-definition TVs come with all sorts of ports for digital input, they’re still programmed to expect video signals very different from the ones generated by most PCs. (The vertical resolution of most HDTVs, for example, is either 720 or 1,080 pixels, while many PCs are limited to a vertical resolution of 600, 768, or 800 pixels.) When you throw your home’s coaxial cable network and an operating system as cumbersome as Windows into the mix—well, let’s just say that ZeeVee is biting into a very complicated problem, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it took a couple of generations of hardware experimentation to thoroughly chew it up.

Being the kind of person who actually enjoys sitting amidst the dust bunnies behind the entertainment center, puzzling out the dozens of cables connecting all of my audiovisual and gaming gear, I thought I’d be up to the challenge of installing the ZvBox. But my first moment of trepidation came when I opened the box and discovered a “Get Going Guide” that included 12 dense pages of diagrams, kicking off with a glossary of “fundamental technical concepts.”

The only really important concept, as it turns out, is that the ZvBox takes video and audio signals from your computer—signals that would ordinarily go to an external VGA monitor and speakers—and transmits them instead over an empty channel on your house’s coaxial cable system. If you tune your TV to that channel, you’ll see and hear whatever is happening on your PC. ZeeVee calls this localcasting.

My first problem—and it’s no fault of ZeeVee’s, although it does limit the potential market for the ZvBox—was that I live in an apartment building. I have a cable outlet in every room, but I have no idea where cable actually enters my apartment, which you need to know to set up the ZvBox. (You have to add a little widget called a channel filter to the network to create that needed empty channel.) So to try out the ZvBox, I had to bypass my apartment’s built-in cables and connect the device directly to my HDTV. This defeated the whole purpose of the localcasting approach—in effect, turning the box into a very expensive VGA cable—but I didn’t have any other way to test its other features.

My second problem was that my home PC is a Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop that I purchased in 2004. It came with an Nvidia GEForce 5200 video card. Remember that resolution-mismatch issue I mentioned above? ZvBox deals with it by adjusting your PC’s output resolution to something that your HDTV can deal with—namely, 1280 x 720 pixels. Unfortunately, many older graphics cards can’t reset the display resolution to an arbitrary number like 1280 x 720.

Again, this problem wasn’t ZeeVee’s responsibility. But it could obviously prevent quite a few people from actually using the ZvBox in their homes. And when I first got the ZvBox review unit, there wasn’t a word about this potential major complication in the “Get Going Guide” or in … Next Page »

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Last spring, Wade wrote about Seattle-based GalleryPlayer’s software, which allows users to display high-resolution photos and artwork on HDTVs. Now GalleryPlayer has apparently “ceased operations” as of July 30, as reported by the Seattle P-I, citing a message on the company’s website. GalleryPlayer was founded in 2003 by former Amazon exec Scott Lipsky.

But Lipsky’s website now says the company “was sold in August, 2008. Buyer data confidential—transaction pending.” So watch this space…

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For many online shoppers, no sooner have they hit the “buy” button than they’re struck by angst over whether they missed out on a better deal at another site. But at BeatThat.com, a consumer electronics shopping site that emerged from beta testing yesterday, there’s less reason to worry: the site digs up the Web’s best deals on camcorders, digital cameras, GPS devices, MP3 players, printers, and TVs by paying consumers for the information.

If you find a product advertised at a price that’s lower than the lowest one currently featured at BeatThat, the company will pay you $2.00. That way, “there’s an incentive for the deals to keep coming in until, quite frankly, you just can’t find a better one,” says David Parker, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Digital Advisors, which created the site. “At that point, we can very confidently say we have the best prices on the Internet.”

Digital Advisors is a five-year-old, privately funded company that already operates a network of shopping websites, focused on high-definition TVs, digital cameras, satellite TV units, laptops, and camcorders. “All of those sites are doing fine. The concept is to help consumers make good choices,” says Parker, who was a co-founder of Bedford, MA-based SoundBite Communications and a business development executive at Viaweb (the maker of Web storefront software founded by Paul Graham, now of Y Combinator fame) and Direct Hit (a search engine acquired in 2002 by Ask Jeeves, now called Ask.com). “But about a year ago we decided that we wanted to try something different. We have a couple of people on our staff who are really good at sniffing out excellent prices, and a light bulb went off when we realized that the best prices we were showing on our sites, which were provided to us by an aggregation service, were never the best prices you could get.”

Parker knew there was a business model in attracting customers looking for price information on specific products, since they’re usually on the cusp of a major purchase, and e-retailers are willing to pay a commission for them—indeed, that’s how Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and the plethora of other comparison-shopping sites make money. “So we came up with the concept for BeatThat, which would have a fixed inventory of products and would always have the best prices for those products,” he says.

The difference between BeatThat and the other shopping sites, Parker explains, is that every price shown on BeatThat has been submitted by a “Deal-Finder”—a person who’s an expert at sniffing out bargains. Like amateur commodities dealers, these contributors spend much of their spare time sifting through websites for discounted products that retailers themselves often aren’t highlighting. They also keep track of the confusing world of coupons, manufacturer rebates, and free shipping offers, which tend to change from day to day. To motivate inveterate bargain hunters to contribute their discoveries to BeatThat, the company set up its payment system, which is already netting several of the top Deal-Finders more than $1,000 a month, according to Parker.

“We didn’t want to rely on the merchants to tell us when the price is good,” Parker says. “We wanted to rely on the literal wisdom of the crowd. And if you have a large enough crowd looking for the best deals, you are going to find them.”

Anyone with an account at BeatThat can submit their product discoveries to the site; once the information is verified, Digital Advisor will put up to $2.00 into user’s account. Once a month, the accumulated funds are transferred into users’ Paypal accounts. After submitting three approved deals, a user is invited to become an official Deal-Finder.

But finding the absolute lowest prices on the Web comes with one big hazard: the best prices are often found … Next Page »

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That’s the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Partly, it’s because my 12-month introductory rate from Comcast just expired, putting my yearly cable bill into the $1,000 range. That’s a lot to stomach, especially considering that about a third of the content coming down the co-ax is commercials.

A friend says that I just need to call the “retention specialists” at Comcast and talk the price back down, but I’m terrible at haggling. And it’s not just about the cost. The truth is that I just don’t watch much traditional TV anymore.

I stopped watching TV news long ago; I get my daily dose of current events from NPR and the Web. There are no good TV comedies these days, unless you count The Daily Show. I can’t stand reality shows. I get all my feature-length movies from Netflix. And out of the current crop of dramatic series, there are only about eight that interest me. (If you want to know, they’re The Closer, Saving Grace, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, Pushing Daisies, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Battlestar Galactica.) And half of the year or more, most of those shows aren’t even on.

But my affection for those eight shows—and the convenience of having new episodes show up on my DVR automatically, when they do come out—is the one thin thread keeping me tethered to Comcast.

And now even that thread is unraveling. Much to the cable companies’ dismay, I imagine, the broadcast and cable TV networks—along with video sites such as Hulu, Veoh, and the Apple iTunes Store—are now putting full episodes of all of the shows I watch online.

Because the Internet video scene is evolving fast, you can never be sure which shows are available where. But I took a few minutes to track down my favorite shows, and discovered that they’re all available from at least two different sources (and remarkably, six of them are available at Hulu alone):

And of course, beyond these studio-produced series, there’s terabytes of other programming available from free video and movie aggregators like Joost, Miro, and Lycos Cinema. There are also several good video search engines out there now, including Blinkx, AOL’s Truveo, Google Video, and Veveo’s Vtap (for mobile devices). The point is that content deprivation is no longer a reason to fear cutting your umbilical cord to the cable companies.

But what if you, like me, are the proud owner of a new(ish) high-definition LCD or plasma HDTV? Doesn’t your beautiful screen deserve to be nourished with high-definition cable? That’s the last question I’m struggling with. If I said goodbye to Comcast, there are a couple of high-definition features I would definitely miss, including GalleryPlayer—an on-demand slide show service that I wrote about here back in April—and occasional Discovery Channel HD Theater specials such as When We Left Earth.

But here, too, there’s a growing list of ways to circumvent the cable companies. A basic one is to invest in a cable to connect your home computer to your HDTV, which instantly turns your TV into a big external monitor. (Just be sure to change the video settings in your computer’s control panel so that you’re getting full 1080×720 or 1920×1080 resolution on the HDTV.) Once you’ve done that, you can download the PC-based version of GalleryPlayer, which actually offers a much greater selection of images than Comcast’s on-demand channel does (though at a nominal price). And anything that you can watch on your computer, you can now watch on the big screen as well.

If you’re not feeling up to the process of connecting your PC to your TV—which can still be a bit dicey for non-geeks—there are several convenient gadgets designed specifically to grab video content from your computer or straight from the Web and show it on your TV, including Apple TV, ZeeVee’s ZvBox, and Roku’s Netflix Player. Or you can dispense with the big display altogether and just watch your shows on a wearable device like the MyVu Crystal, though these devices don’t yet feature high-definition resolution.

So, as you can probably tell, I’ve nearly talked myself into unbundling the phone, Internet, and cable TV service I get from Comcast and dropping the cable part. At this point, the company would have to offer a pretty steep discount to keep me on. (You’ve got my number, Comcast.) But I’m still eager to hear readers’ opinions on the subject. Are you ready to cut the cord? Or have you gone cable-free already—and if so, what’s it like? Please vote in the poll below—and leave your detailed thoughts in our comment section.

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It’s one of those strange ironies in consumer technology. Now that it’s possible to buy a flat-screen HDTV for under $1,000, millions of American homes boast huge, beautiful high-definition displays. But as anyone who has invested in an HDTV knows, only a fraction of the content available from broadcasters and cable systems is in high definition. And high-definition DVDs are still rare and expensive, thanks to the lengthy, destructive, and confusing war between proponents of the BluRay and HD-DVD formats.

Meanwhile, the real explosion in high-definition media content is happening on the Internet. ABC.com offers streaming, high-definition versions of popular shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, and Lost. Hulu, the streaming video site headlined by content from NBC and Fox, includes a high-definition gallery, and video sharing sites like Vimeo include thousands of homemade HD videos. But for the most part, it’s only possible to view all of this cool high-resolution content on the relatively tiny screens of our laptops and desktop PCs.

What’s needed, obviously, is an easy way to use your computer to collect HD content and then use your HDTV to actually watch it. Sure, you can buy a special cable to connect your computer’s VGA or mini-DVI port to your TV’s DVI input—in effect, turning your HDTV into an external monitor for your PC. (In fact, that’s exactly what I wrote about last week in my column about turning your HDTV into a digital art gallery.) But unless you get a really long cable, you’re going to wind up sitting about two feet away from your giant screen. And if you do get a longer one, well, you’ll still be tethered to your TV, with a thick, unsightly cable snaking across your living room.

For the last three years, a stealth-mode company in Littleton , MA, called ZeeVee has been working on a solution for this problem. And today it’s taking the lid off its new technology, which it calls “localcasting.”

The ZeeVee system is built around a small device called a ZvBox that connects to your computers’s VGA and USB ports on one end and to a cable TV jack on the other. It’s basically a miniaturized version of the same television servers that TV stations use to turn recorded TV shows into the digital signals that are sent over the cable system to your home—except that broadcasters pay upwards of $50,000 for their versions, whereas the ZvBox will cost $499.

The ZvBox turns your home PC into a local-area TV transmitter, sending a high-definition signal to any TV in your home over the coaxial TV cable already installed inside the walls of your house or apartment. Once it’s set up, you can designate any unused channel on your TV as the ZeeVee channel, which you can then tune to just as if it were a regular broadcast channel. But the programming on this channel is the content stored on your computer—which you can access either directly, using your computer’s regular desktop interface, or through an elegant new graphical interface called the “Zviewer.”

ZeeVee’s designers dreamed up Zviewer in order to make it easier to browse content on your computer from your couch, which is likely 10 or more feet away from the screen. To navigate the Zviewer interface, ZeeVee provides an advanced remote control with a built-in touchpad, which takes the place of a computer mouse. The whole ZeeVee bundle—including the box, the remote, and all the necessary cables and splitters—is available for pre-order on Amazon.com starting today, with the first shipments expected on June 30.

Brian Mahony, ZeeVee’s vice president of marketing, argues that a ZeeVee box is a better investment than other types of TV peripherals such as AppleTV, and possibly even better than paying for cable service from the likes of Comcast. “The whole set-top box business model is fundamentally broken,” he says. “By the time you’ve set up a cable box, a high-definition DVD player, a game console, and a DVR, what you’ve got is basically a kludgy PC. And each of those devices has a two- to three-year development cycle. Meanwhile there is a tremendous amount of innovation in the software marketplace, all of which is immediately available on your PC. We are basically opening a portal” to that innovation.

Since the ZeeVee equipment isn’t available yet, I haven’t tried it. But based on my conversations with folks at ZeeVee and the literature the company has released, I think Mahony has a good point, and I can see a number of other, more mundane plusses to the localcasting approach.

One is that it gets rid of the external cables you’d otherwise need to link your PC to your TV. Another is that it lets you … Next Page »

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You no longer need to be a multi-billionaire to have large-scale digital art in your home.

When Bill Gates built his 40,000-square-foot mansion on Lake Washington in the early 1990s, one of the most talked-about features was a 22-foot-wide, rear-projection video wall in the reception hall, showing digitized versions of fine art, historic photographs, and the like. Gates founded Corbis, now one of the world’s largest digital stock photo agencies, on the theory that many other people would also enjoy watching a rotating selection of paintings and photographs on large-screen displays in their homes.

At the time, that wasn’t exactly affordable for the hoi polloi. But thanks to good old Moore’s Law—which applies to the transistors in LCD and plasma screens as much as it does to those inside CPUs—the hardware required to turn your own home into a digital art museum is finally within reach. All you need is a high-definition flat-screen TV (incredibly, 42-inch versions with full 1,080-pixel vertical resolution are now available for under $1,000); a Windows or Macintosh computer; and a cable to hook the computer’s external monitor port to your TV’s video input jacks. (I recently got a VGA-to-DVI cable for $22 at CablesToGo.com.)

Once you’ve connected your PC to your TV—which may take some fiddling, as you’ll need to go into your computer’s control panel and pick the proper external-monitor display settings—there are two pathways to watching great high-definition images. If you don’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks for some fantastic professionally produced imagery, I highly recommend a visit to GalleryPlayer. This small Seattle company was founded in 2003 and originally provided digital images from Corbis for large displays in commercial spaces such as hotels and offices; to use it, you needed to buy a $3,000 image server and pay $195 per month for a rotating selection of images. But in a measure of how quickly the digital-imaging market has changed, GalleryPlayer’s software is now free (Windows only, sadly) and images, which can be purchased and downloaded over the Internet, cost about $1 apiece—less if you buy them in packs.

GalleryPlayer has a huge library of images to choose from, ranging from National Geographic nature photography to fine art from some of the world’s best museums, including Boston’s own Museum of Fine Arts. Each image is accompanied by a museum-style caption that appears on screen briefly, telling you about the image’s provenance. If you do try GalleryPlayer, I recommend splurging early—there’s a 50 percent discount on your first purchase.

If you’re a digital photographer, there are two perfectly good alternatives to GalleryPlayer that will cost you absolutely nothing: Slickr (for Windows) and FlickrFan (for the Mac). Technically, these free programs are screen savers—but if you hook your computer up to your HDTV and set your computer’s power options so that the screen never shuts down, you’ve got an instant digital art exhibit. What’s neat about these programs is that they’ll display either photos stored in specific folders on your computer or pictures you’ve uploaded to your Flickr photo-sharing account. Both programs also animate your photos in “Ken Burns” style, meaning they slide gracefully across the screen—a nice break from GalleryPlayer’s static images. If you’ve got a lot of old photos that you never bother to look at on your PC, Slickr and FlickrFan offer a great way to resurrect them.

For Boston residents, or anyone else who gets their cable TV service from Comcast, there’s an extra piece of good news. If you already have an HDTV and a Comcast high-definition set-top box, you can watch high-definition digital slide shows from GalleryPlayer without the need for a PC or special gallery software.

GalleryPlayer shows are a free part of the On Demand service from Comcast. But they’re buried several levels deep in the On Demand menu, so many customers don’t even know about them. To find them, click the On Demand button on your Comcast remote, then choose “HD On Demand,” then “TV Entertainment,” then “GalleryPlayer.” You’ll see a selection of about ten half-hour shows, each comprised of about 30 stunning, high-resolution photos or paintings set to pleasant jazz, classical, and New Age background tunes. The images change every month, and cover themes such as African wildlife, underwater photography, space imagery, Van Gogh paintings, and autumn in New England.

Boot up GalleryPlayer, Slickr, or FlickrFan at your next cocktail party and your guests will think you’re the Bill Gates of your block.

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Luminus Devices of Billerica, MA, has struck another deal for the distribution of its “PhlatLight” super-bright LED technology, the company announced today. Under the agreement, Toyota Tsusho America, will distribute and support television and projector PhlatLight products in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Mexico. A separate agreement inked last week will facilitate the distribution of PhlatLight technology for general illumination.

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If you’re not crazy about the compact fluorescent lights being touted as the future of home lighting, but you want something more environmentally conscious than Thomas Edison’s old incandescent bulb, Luminus Devices of Billerica, MA, may soon have just the thing for you.

Luminus makes very bright LEDs, and has been doing a nice business for itself selling them to companies like Samsung—which uses them as light sources in large-screen projection TVs over 50 inches—and LG Electronics, which builds them into portable projectors. But last October Luminus announced it wanted to expand into the general illumination business, and hired as its director of sales David Sciabica, a former vice president for sales at Philips Lumileds, that lighting company’s LED division. This week Luminus inked a deal with Avnet Electronics Marketing of Phoenix, AZ, which sells various electronic components in more than 70 countries. Avnet will provide distribution, design, and supply-chain services for Luminus’s Phlatlight technology in the illumination market.

“Phlatlight” comes from the term “photonic lattice,” the technology that makes Luminus’s LEDs so bright. An LED is basically a tiny bit of semiconductor. When you run electricity through it, some percent of the electrons get converted into photons—but a fair number of those photons get reabsorbed and turn into heat before they make it out of the LED. A photonic lattice is a regular series of features inscribed into the LED, with spacing close the wavelength of the light involved. The lattice forces the photons to travel along desired paths, so more of them make it out of the LED, producing more light.

“PhlatLight LEDs produce thousands of lumens from a single large chip and are uniquely suited to replace halogen, arc and fluorescent lamps in many applications such as entertainment, architectural and medical lighting,” said Cary Eskow, director of Avnet LightSpeed, the Avnet division that will handle the LEDs, in a statement announcing the deal.

The photonic lattice technology came out of the lab of MIT professor John Joannopoulos, and was further developed by Alexei Erchak, who earned his Ph.D. there in 2002 and co-founded the company with Joannopoulos that same year. The company has at least 11 US patents and has reportedly raised $67 million in financing.

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