This weekend the world was introduced to the “Hulubritory” where Will Arnette is conceiving new ways of liquefying the public’s brains for easy consumption. One of those new tools for brain liquefication is Hulu’s most recent attempt at original content creation called Paul the Male MatchMaker. This comedy from Warner Bros. Studio 2.0 pans on the public’s love for the adult dating genre.

This mockumentary-style sitcom showcases Paul, a neurotic socialite who decides to take a stab at running his inherited matchmaking service. Hilarity ensues when his direct, brutally honest approach is not well received by his clients and guest stars, including Janeane Garofalo (The Larry Sanders Show), Lisa Edelstein (House M.D.), Tony Hale (Arrested Development), David Eigenberg (Sex and the City), Jean Louisa Kelly (Yes, Dear), and Sam Trammell (True Blood).

Hulu is not the only streaming service bringing its own self-generated programming to the web. Today, Netflix released its first eight episodes of Lilyhammer for streaming users only. The series stars Steven Van Zandt (Sopranos) as a former New York City mobster restarting his life in Norway. Netflix was not the first though. You may recall Hulu attempted this last March with the drama The Confession staring Kiefer Sutherland and John Hurt.

Starting Monday, Feb 13, Liz Tuccillo (He’s Just Not That Into You, Sex and the City) and Paul Bartholomew (Mad Men) will bring 10 episodes to Hulu as the sole delivery of content. The new show will only be available to paying subscribers of Hulu PLUS. Check out Paul the Male MatchMaker next Monday, and let us know what you thought in the comments section below.

This week the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) released a regulatory filing to the FCC detailing the deployment of CableCARD to consumer devices from the top five cable companies. Details were included from Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable, although the report provided summary data of the top 10 companies. According to the report “over 554,000 CableCARDs deployed for use in retail devices by the ten largest incumbent cable operators.” Of course the NCTA, who has fought against the CableCARD rules from their initial drafting, was very quick to point out that since the CableCARD rules have gone into effect those same ten companies have “deployed more than 32,000,000 operator-supplied set-top boxes with CableCARDs.”

Fortunately, not everything written in the document’s 13 pages was pure rhetoric. There was also a lot of interesting data about how many CableCARDs have been deployed, how many of them were installed by technicians vs. the customers doing self installs, and how many truck rolls (service calls resulting in a technician being sent to the customer’s house) were required in the first 30 days to get a CableCARD deployment operational.

Comcast is the largest cable company in the country, so it makes sense that they would have the most consumer CableCARD systems deployed. Of the companies that reported the self install rate, Comcast fits right in the middle. The number they reported, 29%, is about what I would have expected. It’s not a tiny number, but it’s sufficiently large given that a consumer who did enough research to decide to buy/build their own set-top-box or home theater PC, is probably also reasonably comfortable installing their own gadgets too. The number of truck rolls required also points out some interesting data. Cablevision customers and technicians appear to be doing the best job of getting things working on the first effort where Charter obviously has some work to do! The other interesting piece of data here is Cablevision’s self install percentage. Did 57% of their CableCARD customers really do their own installations? If so, then our respect goes out to those 22,000 customers who, not only installed on their own, where pretty successful at getting it all working.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in this chart is that it’s supposed to show data per quarter, but it only has data for quarters two and four. Unfortunately, the NCTA isn’t very consistent with their FCC filings. In fact, Q4 isn’t even technically accurate as the data actually covers September through December of 2011. Putting all that aside, the numbers themselves are interesting. In four of the top five companies CableCARD subscribers grew. In two cases, Cablevision and Cox, the growth was even at a pretty significant percentage. Comcast, on the other hand, dropped more than 36,000 CableCARD subscribers. We don’t have Comcast’s fourth quarter subscriber numbers yet, because they aren’t releasing those details until February 15th. Since we don’t know if Comcast lost video customers for the quarter, the only other assumption that we could make is that many of these CableCARD customers switched to Comcast’s newer Xfinity DVRs.

The last chart just shows the number of CableCARDs deployed as a percentage of the company’s total subscribers. Even given the large percent of Comcast customers who switched from using CableCARD in a consumer device, they are still out in front. If Cablevision continues the rate of growth from Q4 into 2012 they will very quickly overtake Comcast.

So despite the cable industry’s ongoing assault against CableCARD, in favor of their own locked-down boxes, I think it’s safe to say that CableCARD is doing well. While we know that home-built home theater PCs don’t make up the majority of these CableCARD installs, we certainly hope to see more people building Windows 7 Media Center boxes equipped with any one of the many CableCARD tuners currently available. We’re also excited to see Ceton going up against Tivo directly with their Q Entertainment Platform.

Souce: NCTA

From looking at the UltraViolet flyer it sounds great: I can watch my movie any time on computers, tablets, and even smartphone, because it is on select devices. I guess you can also share your collection with up to 6 family members. I am not sure that works because can’t you just give your username and password to everyone? (we will find out). From the flyer it is also apparently extremely easy with only three steps. 1 – go to a website (http://www.sonypictures.com/uv/drive) …Also the worst URL ever. 2 – Enter code. 3 – Create some accounts and watch my movie! If that is it then I am surprised, and that sounds like it should take about two minutes, so let’s find out.

Step 1 – “From your computer, go to www.sonypictures.com/uv/drive

This seems really simple, so I opened up Chrome and boom all I have to do is enter my code? But Ryan seems skeptical.

Step 2 – “Enter the Redemption Code below”

Alright I think I can handle this.

So I enter it and simply hit “REDEEM”…uh oh LIES! I can not simply go to step 3! I have to tell Sony where I bought the Blu-ray. This also seems easy so I input the only place you should buy Blu-rays, Amazon.com.

Step 3 – “Follow the steps to create or log in to your free UltraViolet and Sony Pictures movie accounts to start enjoying your movie”

Alright so that one wasn’t on the flyer, but this one was. I now have to create some accounts. According to the flyer I have to create two accounts which seems very odd, but let’s roll with it.

So after filling in:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Birth Day
• Zip Code
• Email Address
• If I have an UltraViolet Account??? (Aren’t I signing up for one?)
• Then I have to sign up for a Sony Pictures account… and an UltraViolet account.
• ….WAIT???!?!? HUH??? alright I am in
• Also I need to agree to about five different privacy policies and terms of use.

Alright so I have all this jazz filled out so now I can watch my movie right? Nope, I need to agree to another terms of use:

Alright I agree without reading it just like everyone else, so now I can watch it right? According to the next page I can, so says Ryan Gosling:

To my surprise I get a nice Silverlight video player with my movie. It even has chapter support:

So overall that didn’t seem too complicated to get it going, but the real question now is do I need both of these accounts to watch this online? Also what about mobile devices? Well according to this big purple bar on top of the page my account is not activated at UltraViolet, so let’s do this now. There is a direct link so that should be simple. The link does nothing more than take me to www.uvvu.com where I need to sign in. Enter my credentials and I am in, but only after I fill in a second secret question. I am not sure why Sony didn’t ask me to fill it out, but that seems alright. They send me an email and I have to go validate it. So I open up my Gmail where in fact an email had been sent and my account is now activated.

It appears as though any movie I redeem will be accessible over at uvvu.com, however if I actually want to stream Drive then I have to go to the Sony website.  The odd thing here is that it does NOT ask for my UltraViolet account. It actually asks for my email and password for my Sony account. Once I log back in now I can watch Drive once again. While this doesn’t seem like a huge issue, there are a lot of different movie distributers out there and if you have to have a separate account for each that is just going to be a pain in the butt.

Alright back to mobile phones though. I head back over to uvvu.com to see what I can play this content on. I click on the big “Our Apps and Devices” button in hopes my brand new Galaxy Nexus can play this content back. NOPE! Apparently there are NO devices that UltraViolet works on. This is actually a let down and basically a lie according to the flyer.

While there is no list, I remember someone saying that Flixster had UltraViolet. After digging through their website I found www.flixster.com/ultraviolet with a nice video. So I better sign up for an account so I can stream it to my Android Flixster app. After quickly signing up on Flixster.com I think I am good to go.  I press on the redeem option and it is time to link my UV account with Flixster. I also apparently need to give Warner Bros. the rights to access my UV account. These seems fine, so let’s do this. After linking my account I have to enter the UltraViolet code once more:

However apparently my code is now invalid

Do not fear though, apparently since I already activated it with Sony it is now just in my “Flixster” collection. So it is on uvvu.com, sony.com, and flixster.com. That is not confusing at all. The interesting thing is if I just simply press play on flixster.com it does NOT redirect to sony.com, but instead it just starts playing. This seems great. However just like everything else in this process it is not that easy. When I was streaming Drive at Sony.com I was able to get SD and HD streams, however on Flixster.com I only receive SD, and it is also Flash.

So now it is time to see if it starts streaming on my Android phone, which is the only reason I signed up for the Flixster account. After downloading the official flixster application on the Android Marketplace and signing in and checking my collection I have the option to stream or to download.

So this was a journey into UltraViolet. At the end of the day, UltraViolet does seem to work. It is not uniform, requires multiple accounts, and seems to not have enough information, but after a while you can stream a movie. It just seems like too much work for the avid consumer, which I believe is the real problem. How was your UltraViolet experience? We want to know! Leave comments below.

Update 1: I have also tested the Flixster app on the Kindle Fire and it streamed Drive just fine.

Additionally Drive is now available on Blu-ray:

UltraViolet à la Paramount

Let’s start with Paramount’s UltraViolet offering, in general. You may want to seriously consider those iTunes and Windows Media options, because Paramount’s flavor of UltraViolet doesn’t seem fully baked yet. You need to sign up for yet another account (just like at UVVU, Flixster, Sony, and Universal), so we’re up to five accounts now with only four of the majors in the pool. Once you’ve registered, linked, and logged in, you can redeem, view, and download your Paramount titles.

Paramount's proprietary download manager doubles as the only playback mechanism for their UltraViolet titles

You’ll need to install yet another retailer-specific program to download and play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles offline on your PC or Mac. That’s about where the similarities end.

Like the other studios, Paramount’s site is designed to show you not just their titles, but all of the titles in your UltraViolet locker. At release time and as of this writing, this feature doesn’t work properly. We reported the issue to Paramount’s UltraViolet help desk and promptly received a message from Zukor LLC explaining that “you will only be able to see your Paramount Ultra Violet digital copies.” Actually…not true. The page is there—it’s intended to show the other titles; Paramount’s FAQs clearly state that “you will be able to see your entire UltraViolet library;” oh…and UltraViolet is one word.

Your UltraViolet library on Paramount's site may appear slightly broken

Unlike with every other UltraViolet retailer, the only option for viewing UltraViolet titles on iOS devices is by streaming, over WiFi, from paramountmovies.com. You can’t watch them in Flixster, so you can’t watch them offline on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. To clarify, they’ll show up in your collection in Flixster, but you can’t play or download them there. That also means you can’t watch them on your Google TV and you can’t watch them on your Android phone or tablet. In one test, we couldn’t even stream a title on a 4-month old Windows 7 PC with no explanation as to why.

Paramount’s Digital Store

Paramount is the first retailer to offer direct sales of UltraViolet digital titles. No discs—just the digital copy. They’ve rolled out an initial offering of about sixty titles, ranging from catalog titles Chinatown and the Beverly Hills Cop series to newer releases like Super 8 and the Paranormal Activity trilogy [please let this end as a trilogy]. Purchasing a title couldn’t be easier—select a title to buy, provide your credit card or PayPal account information, and the movie appears in your UltraViolet library. No shopping carts, no redemptions codes. It’s simple.

That’s about the end of the good news. First, let’s talk pricing. While we all might like to think that digital copies should be priced notably less than their packaged equivalents, we know from services like Amazon, iTunes, and VUDU that this is not usually the case. Most digital movies from these retailers cost between 7 and 15 dollars, or 15 to 20 dollars for HD. On iTunes, many of these digital movies do come with extras, like those included with packaged discs.

Paramount’s UltraViolet pricing is higher. Much higher. All catalog titles—whether two years old or fifty years old—are $12.99 in standard definition and $19.99 in HD. Newer titles are $16.99 in standard definition and $22.99 in HD. Many [why not all?] titles are also available to rent by streaming with the usual 30 day/48 hour limitations.

To put this pricing model in perspective, the guys on Seen in HD used this week’s Paranormal Activity 3 release as an example. For the UltraViolet movie in HD (with no extras), Paramount is charging $22.99. On Amazon, you can buy the Blu-ray combo pack with Blu-ray, DVD, and standard definition iTunes, Windows Media, and UltraViolet digital copies for $21.99.

For catalog titles, it’s even worse. Paramount is selling a standard definition UltraViolet copy of Airplane—a thirty year old film—for $12.99. A digital copy of the same movie costs $9.99 on iTunes or $6.49 on Amazon Instant Video. Or you can get a Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams Double Feature DVD including Airplane at Amazon for $9.99.

So there’s that. Then there’s the issue of playback. We already established that you can’t play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles on any disconnected device except for computers running their proprietary player. And since there aren’t any connected TVs or Blu-ray players available yet that support UltraViolet (and even those recently announced depend on Flixster), you probably can’t play these digital purchases on your TV. You can, of course, if you have a home theater PC, but even then you have to play them using Paramount’s custom desktop software, so forget about using your remote control.

HD playback is even more limited. To play Paramount’s HD UltraViolet videos, you must have an HDCP-compliant PC. Forget the Mac—it’s not supported. Your only hope of enjoying HD-quality video is on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 laptop or HTPC connected to an HDCP-compliant monitor with a DisplayPort, DVI-D or HDMI cable. Get all that?

And finally, while the other retailers download UltraViolet movies to your Videos folder as MP4 videos so they’re easily identifiable and transportable, Paramount instead plops thousands of tiny data files on your computer. The video we used for testing comprised 6,630 separate files with clever names like 00a4db57-7774-4907-b155-f054bc12981c. And now all of the other video programs that depend on your Videos folder get to parse through all of that crap.

Paramount clutters your Videos folder with thousands of data files

High Hopes Dashed

It’s widely recognized that UltraViolet has had a rocky start, and we’ve certainly hedged on recommending this technology, but we had high expectations for Paramount. These are the folks with some of the best movie franchises in their catalog, including, The Godfather, Indiana Jones, and Star Trek. Surely they’d want to make a big, successful splash at launch, right?

Instead, this launch is a big mess. It’s buggy, it’s extremely limited, and their digital titles are ridiculously expensive. Perhaps the only redeeming quality here is that Paramount is giving us an out as they continue to include iTunes and Windows Media digital copies in their combo packs. Our recommendation here should be obvious: save your money.

Meanwhile, Fox, a member of the consortium behind UltraViolet, revealed at CES that they do not expect to release titles with UltraViolet until late 2012. According to a report by the Las Angeles Times, Fox executives want to see more retail outlets, more compatible devices, and a common downloadable format.

Accounts of UltraViolet’s success are varied, with representatives from the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium of vendors behind UltraViolet, lauding it’s success to date and downplaying consumers’ initial frustrations. The president of Warner Home Video, Ron Sanders, states that “consumers are excited about the prospects for streaming and mobile device use with [UltraViolet]” while the press continues to report consumers’ complaints. Meanwhile, Warner’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2—the most successful movie of the year—continues to receive nearly as many one-star ratings as five at Amazon.com…largely in response to UltraViolet.

Updated 1/23 to reflect information received from Netflix.

Amidst news of management shuffling and pending financial results, there seems to be a lot of customer-facing changes going on at Netflix these days.

First off, Warner Brothers announced last week at CES that since they’ve seen “very positive results” [Warner Home Video's exact words] from the previous 28-day window, they’re going to start holding new releases back from Netflix even longer—now for eight weeks.

Then just this past week, we started getting messages from readers about Netflix no longer supporting HD or 5.1 audio and subtitles. With a little digging, we found that, indeed, titles previously available in HD with 5.1 audio and subtitles (on supported platforms, like Xbox and PS3), no longer sported such features. We were able to find HD titles and even titles with Dolby 5.1 audio, but mostly TV episodes. There’s clearly been a change in the availability of these audio and video features, but Netflix hasn’t announced anything about it. We have a message in to Netflix PR to see if they’ll explain the changes.

Where'd the HD and 5.1 audio go?

Netflix responded to our query to let us know that there was an issue with metadata that has since been resolved. In fact, our tests show that Limitless and many other titles that didn’t appear badged as HD a few days ago now properly reflect their HD video quality and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio.

Meanwhile, get ready for some changes we do know about: fewer premium titles. Netflix’ content agreement with Starz ends in February, so you’ll soon see fewer of the premium titles available for streaming, including large catalogs of content from Disney and Sony. The Starz agreement ends on February 28.

1.) Resident Evil Revelations 3DS Demo

This is the second RE game that will be released on the 3DS, and while Mercenaries was a bit of a let down to some, it had a tiny demo of the potential that Revelations could be. Nintendo and Capcom today put up a full blown demo of Resident Evil Revelations on the 3DS eShop. You get to play it 30 times before it magically disappears from your system which is bad. This also marks the beginning of demos on the eShop which is great! So if you have a 3DS go head over to the eShop and download it now.

2.) Resident Evil Retribution Trailer

Milla J is back for an all new Resident Evil movie once again in 3D. Don’t be scared by the first 30 seconds which seem to be a big Sony ad:

3.) Resident Evil 6 Trailer

After watching this trailer all I can say is WOW! I am blown away. Leon is back and it is going to be amazing.

We stopped by Dish’s booth and asked for a demonstration and explanation of this tuner wizardry. The answer is rather ingenious: you can set up your Hopper DVR to automatically record the four major networks’ prime time lineup—every night. The Hopper pulls all four networks through one transponder, leaving you with two tuners during prime time hours to record anything else. At any other time of day, all three tuners are available for use.

This feature, called PrimeTime Anytime, keeps eight days’ worth of programming on a separate drive partition, so it doesn’t impact the available space for your own recorded shows. If you can’t watch one of the PrimeTime shows within the eight days, you can save it to your Recorded TV. And if you choose not to enable PrimeTime Anytime, you can use all three tuners at any time of day.

PrimeTime Anytime will be available on Hopper boxes at no additional cost.

Watch the PrimeTime Anytime walkthrough below or on our YouTube channel.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

One of the higher profile products to be announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show has been the Simple.TV. It’s a device that works as a DVR for people who don’t want to pay for cable. For $150 you’ll get a device that will allow you to watch and record free over-the-air (or ClearQAM) content. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not after you dig into all of the details. For starters, the device doesn’t have an HDMI port. In fact, it doesn’t have any sort of audio/video output port at all. Instead you attach the device to your home network via wired Ethernet. That’s right, there isn’t any built-in WiFi here either. Once on your network you can then view the live or recorded television shows on other streaming devices that you might own. When it launches in the spring they say that it will support Roku, Google TV, Boxee, and iPad. So how much storage does it have? None. Yep, a DVR that doesn’t even include a hard drive. You’ll have to supply your own and attach it via USB. Have you seen the cost of hard drives lately? If not, don’t go looking, you might have a heart attack at how much the prices have jumped up. Even just a nice 500 GB external drive is going to cost you about $85. Ok, so maybe you’ve got a spare hard drive laying around, and may you already have a Roku or Boxee box, at least you won’t have to pay a monthly fee, right? Nope! Well, technically, you don’t have to, but if you want to actually have an electronic program guide and the ability to schedule recordings, you’ll need to pay $4.99/month. Have we mentioned yet that it only has one tuner? So you can only record one show at a time, unless you want to buy two of these (and two hard drives). All of a sudden, this simple, cheap, DVR isn’t looking so simple or cheap!

So let’s recap the total costs on the Simple.TV DVR.

Let us offer up another idea. If this is something that interests you, do you already have a computer? You can buy TV tuner devices for that PC for far less money and use something like Windows Media Center for free. You won’t even need to pay for the guide data. It comes for free in Media Center. If the computer is standard desktop PC, you could get something like the Avermedia Duet. It’s an internal PCI Express card with two tuners, for $65. If you can’t go the internal card route, you could pick up a USB tuner, like the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q. It’s a single tuner USB device for about $68. Or, even better, grab the SiliconDust HDHomeRun. It offers two tuners, and attaches to your network via Ethernet. It’s $99 and would allow you to watch and record TV on any PC in your house simply using your existing network! If the PC isn’t directly connected to your television that won’t be an issue either if you already own an Xbox 360. Microsoft’s gaming console naively works as a Windows Media Center Extender, giving you full access to all of your media, plus live and recorded TV if you connect (through your network) to a Windows PC.

At the end of the day, all of these options require a little bit of work on your part. While we hate to recommend, the simplest DVR is definitely the one that your cable company will give you for $10/month. If you’re not willing to pay for cable though, you’re going to need to spend some cash upfront, and put in a little work to get the same sort of features.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

Source: Simple.TV

Actual product announcements were few and far between. Really there were only three things announced. First they discussed Fox apps coming to the Xbox. They are mostly on-demand video streaming from the various Fox brands including regular Fox (Glee, Simpsons, etc.), WSJ Live, Fox News Channel, and IGN. The second announcement was also for the Xbox: Sesame Street TV. It offers interactive episodes of Sesame Street. Now your kids can play along with Elmo and the gang. Release dates weren’t given for either of these products had. The third, and final, announcement of the night was that Kinect on Windows will be launching on Feb 1st. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $250.

We decided to chronicle the keynote in images. Peruse through the gallery  to see how the pictures tell the story of this year’s keynote.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

The writers over at Kotaku dug up a very interesting patent that was filed by Microsoft in 2007, and finally granted by the USPTO on December 27th, 2011. This patent, number 8,083,593, describes a way to include DVR functionality into Microsoft’s gaming console, the Xbox. From the patent request:

An integrated gaming and media experience is disclosed, including recording of content on a gaming console. A digital video recorder (DVR) application running alongside a television client component allows users to record media content on the gaming console. The DVR application also integrates itself with the console menu. Once integrated, users can record media content while playing games. Alternatively, users can record content when the gaming console is turned off. The recorded content can include television programming, gaming experience (whether local or online), music, DVDs, and so on. When in the recording state, users can also switch between various other media modes, whether gaming, television, and so on.

The idea that the Xbox sholud include tuners and operate as a DVR is one that has been kicked around by the Windows Media Center community for years. It makes a lot of sense. Microsoft has been trying to win the living room for over a decade, and while Media Center used to be the Redmond company’s main weapon in that battle, it has clearly leaned on the Xbox 360 to take the fight to the next level. You can’t blame them for the shift either. Despite the fact that Windows Media Center has around 6 million people using it as a DVR, the Xbox 360 is already in 57 million living rooms.

This patent doesn’t just suggest the ability to watch and record television on the gaming console though, it also adds another key feature. If Microsoft were to implement this patent in their next console it would also enable gamers to record their gaming session. No longer would they need to buy stand-alone video capture devices, such as the Hauppauge HD-PVR to record their latest Modern Warfare frag-fest.

If Microsoft is able to pull this idea off, especially if it uses CableCARD tuners (here’s looking at you Ceton), they may finally have the one box solution to occupy the holy input 1  position on millions of televisions!

Souce: US Patent and Trademark Office via Kotaku

The Roku Streaming Stick will plug into a television’s MHL-compliant HDMI port, and it requires no other wires—not even power. Note that this does not mean you can just plug one of these guys into any TV’s HDMI port. MHL, or Mobile High-definition Link, is a new standard that is just starting to make its way onto consumer devices. To date, only Samsung and Toshiba are making TVs that support MHL, but we’re likely to see many more devices introduced this year, including Best Buy’s own Insignia brand.

Roku expects the new Streaming Stick to be available to consumers this year at a price point similar to their popular Roku streaming boxes.

Read Roku’s blog post, announcing the new device.

Create a New Account…Again

Like Warner and Sony, Universal requires you to create an online account and link it to your UltraViolet account. That’s four accounts you need now for UltraViolet. Unlike the other UltraViolet sites, you can’t use an email address for your username, so if you were trying to coordinate your account information to make things easier on yourself, you’re out of luck. Also, your Universal account password must be 6-8 characters, which seems oddly insecure considering everything the studios are going through to lock down and protect this content.

Universal’s site is wisely badged with a “beta” flag, and it features a prominent “Let us know what you think!” button to provide feedback. The intent is good, but they appear to lack the support necessary to handle the feedback: we received an irrelevant, generic troubleshooting message in reply to general comments we left about the site.

Plenty of Options

Unlike Warner and Sony, Universal isn’t eliminating its other Digital Copy formats in favor of UltraViolet. Instead, UltraViolet is an available option in addition to a Digital Copy through either iTunes, VUDU, or Amazon Instant Video. That’s right: you have a choice. How customer-friendly! Warner and Sony should take notice; Paramount may already have, since they recently announced the January release of a new Dark of the Moon combo pack with UltraViolet and Digital Copy. This not only gives consumers options, it gives the studios metrics they can use to determine which format(s) their customers prefer. Now we just have to hope that the studios are watching.

Universal lets you redeem an UltraViolet copy and one of three other Digital Copy formats

Universal throws in a second UltraViolet title for free when you redeem your Cowboys & Aliens code. In our test, the selection was limited to picking between Dazed and Confused and Being John Malkovich.

Streaming and Downloading

Universal’s UltraViolet titles can be streamed on all UltraViolet streaming devices, including Macs and PCs through a browser with the Flash plug-in and supported mobile devices and Google TV through Flixster. Video quality in the browser is good (nearly a 2 Mbps bit rate), but we experienced jerks and tears, even on a powerful, Gb Ethernet-connected computer. Universal’s site shows titles from other providers, but they’re presented in a way that seems unnecessarily disjointed.

UltraViolet Titles from other providers appear disabled, with a buried link to Flixster

Universal’s UltraViolet titles can also be downloaded, but here’s where it gets confusing. From Universal’s site, you can download the purchased title, Cowboys & Aliens, to a PC, but you cannot download the free title. You cannot download titles to a Mac from Universal’s site, but you can download both titles to a Mac from Flixster.com to play offline in the Flixster Collections desktop software. You can also download either title to your mobile device through Flixster.

Downloading the UltraViolet copy of Cowboys & Aliens to a PC requires that you install yet another desktop application, and it’s an arduous process requiring the following steps:

• On Universal’s site, click Download.
• Download and run the installer file CowboysAndAliens_UV_3.exe.
• Click Install once the installer runs.
• Sign in to your Universal account.
• When the installer completes, the Download Manager will run; wait for the download to complete.

What's with the big red button?

The Cowboys & Aliens installer leaves a mess of stuff in the Start menu

By default, Universal’s UltraViolet titles download to the Public Videos folder on your Windows computer. Unlike the downloadable content from all of the other studios offering UltraViolet, these are in Windows Media (.WMV) format, and the video quality is surprisingly good. Cowboys & Aliens is a 720 x 320 widescreen video with a bit rate of over 6 Mbps. The digital rights on the file include the ability to sync to a device capable of playing subscription files, so presumably you could play this on your Windows Phone and legacy Zune devices. And unlike the titles from any of the other UltraViolet partners, it will appear and play in Windows Media Center.

Conclusions

Universal’s first UltraViolet offering seems like a cautious test, complete with a low-budget toolset and plenty of digital alternatives. And while the differentiated online and download experience might further confuse the market, this may well be a studio’s best UltraViolet adoption to date solely because Universal is not abandoning previously-offered Digital Copy options. If anything, they’re giving you more options than ever before. With just one combo pack purchase, we received unlimited UltraViolet streaming, a downloadable UltraViolet copy (that plays in Flixster’s clunky software), a downloadable Windows Media file, and a downloadable iTunes movie with iTunes Extras (similar to DVD bonus features). Plus Universal threw in an additional movie for free.

Clearly Universal just raised the bar. Now can someone please work on making it all usable? This is all still way too complicated for mere mortals.

Once again, CliqueClack has comprehensively documented these TV events in a mid-season premiere calendar. You can view the calendar online or subscribe to include the premiere schedule in your own calendar. [Note that the subscribe link may attempt to launch your calendar software.]

Update 4:46pm ET: Microsoft has commented on this Connect article (same issue, but different post) the following:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. This has been escalated to our data providers.

That’s an interesting comment from Microsoft though as Zap2It’s, which is Microsoft’s guide data provider, website shows guide data through January 2nd.

Update 12/23/2011: It appears as though Microsoft and Zap2It have figured out the issue. Guide data has returned! Just as it has always worked, you won’t need to do anything to update your guide listings. The listings will be downloaded automatically for you, if they haven’t been already. If you haven’t received updated listings yet you can manually force an update. From the Media Center home screen go to Tasks > Settings > TV > Guide > Get Latests Guide Listings.

Source: Microsoft Connect