Microsoft has announced that it has made deals with Sony BMG and MTV to add their content to its free MSN video service.
Currently the service has offerings from National Geographic and ITN but will now add shows such as “Pimp My Ride” and music videos.
The deal with Sony BMG will put exclusive videos, backstage footage, interviews, and tour info on MSN Video.
“The music industry is facing tough challenges and it is all now about becoming a music entertainment company rather than just a record company”, said Ulrich Jarkel, senior vice president, Digital and Business Development Sony BMG.
“The whole game has changed. We now have over 150 ways to access Justin Timberlake content for example.”
MTV has made similar deals in the recent past, giving users access to South Park, Pimp My Ride, Punk’d, Cribs and Soapbox.
“This is one of our most important partnerships”, said Gideon Bierer, senior vice president, Digital Media, MT, “we will be adding other MTV network brands in the future from channels such as Nickelodeon and Comedy Central”.
The service is available in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden and the US. It will launch in Belgium, Denmark and Norway later this year.
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LG Mobile has announced that its very popular Viewty mobile phone has now become the first handset to become certified for recording video using DivX compression.
Although the list of DivX-certified devices continues to grow, the list of mobile phones is very short. There are only two phones that even support DivX playback, the Samsung SGH-F500 and SGH-F508.
The Viewty camera phone captures video at an abnormally large 120 FPS and a relatively large 640 x 480 Resolution. Besides adding better quality Compression the Viewty will no longer need to use conversion software that 3GP video needs.
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According to Motorola, the upcoming 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard should allow HD video to finally be available on cellular networks. Motorola promises to prove its theory next week at the Mobile World Congress.
The company also stated that they will demo the standard and show examples of HD video moving in both directions including something they call “HD blogging”. Motorola will use LTE to stream live HD video to a set top box so that viewers can follow mobile phone footage in real-time. From the opposite direction, the standard will be shown Streaming an HDTV feed from home straight to the handset, cutting out the need for re-encoding.
Motorola also added that the very low lag times of LTE will make real-time actions finally possible. To demo their statement, the company will show off a racing game played online against other players. They will also show VoIP calls made using LTE.
The company did not say how long until the technologies would be commercially available but LTE should launch in some areas by early 2009.
