ZuDfunck

One of the features that immediately caught my eye about Mountain Lion was AirPlay Mirroring. As I noted yesterday, this offers a powerful presentation tool for business users as well as a great classroom addition for teachers and trainers.

Of course, it’s also a great entertainment solution and one that has some dramatic advantages over AirPlay Mirroring on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. Those advantages are likely to set the stage for a showdown between Apple and the entertainment industry.

Let’s start with the basics – AirPlay mirroring lets you send video and audio from your Mac to your HDTV wirelessly. In effect, it works like having a second display attached to you Mac and choosing to mirror your internal display rather add a second desktop. Anything that happens on your Mac happens on your TV.

That includes games, Keynote and PowerPoint presentations, and web pages – including web pages that show videos, most notably videos from network programs. Miss last night’s episode of The Big Bang Theory? Want to watch on your TV but not feeling so invested that you want to shell out the handful of cash to buy it via iTunes? No problem, fire up CBS.com, turn on AirPlay mirroring and watch the episode on your TV for free. The same approach will work any broadcaster’s website as well as with Hulu.

Yes, you’ll still see a couple of short ads, but you’re still watching it on your schedule and on your TV at no cost. No iTunes purchase, no monthly cable/satellite company charge for your DVR – it’s a cord cutter’s dream. And a network or cable executive’s nightmare – and that doesn’t even take into account that this will work with all manner of pirated streams as well.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that a device has let you browse the web (complete with Flash, if you must) on your TV. That was one of the hallmarks of Google TV that the search giant hyped almost two years ago. It was also easy for the entertainment industry including the major networks and Hulu to work around, however. All they had to do was use modify their sites to serve different content when the Google TV’s browser was detected in http requests – problem solved.

That strategy won’t work with Mountain Lion and the Apple TV. A browser request from a Mountain Lion Mac using AirPlay Mirroring will look exactly the same as a request from a Mac that isn’t. And it won’t matter what browser is running either. AirPlay Mirroring will work just fine with any browser (and any application, for that matter).

It's a cord-cutter's dream. Yeah, if you can afford a Mac, you can probably afford cable. But, in keeping with the theme of this blog. Another tool to use in building a cord cutting arsenal.

Last month, he seemed frustrated, tweeting out “#screwcable” when a feud between MSG and Time Warner Cable forced Mr. Wilson to consume pirated content if he wanted to see the (pre-Linsanity) Knicks. But during yesterday’s talk, Mr. Wilson seemed more convinced of the universality of the condition.

“Making everybody a criminal is not the way to do this,” he told the crowd in an impassioned speech, appearing visibly moved by the wrong-headedness of the government’s approach:

“We gotta fix the system so that the content is available legally on the internet in a way that it is available for people to consume it. As convenient as turning on your TV and watching HBO, that’s how convenient it has to be. The content industry has not made this content convenient to access on the internet and as a result everybody, and I mean everybody, is a pirate. Okay so in the world where everybody is breaking the law, you gotta look at the law. Is it the right law?”

Rather, as CNET reports, Mr. Wilson proposes establishing an independent group to develop “a black and white list.” He listed Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify, and Rhapsody under “the good guys.” (One could also add Boxee and Turntable.fm, both USV-backed companies, to that list.)

I do at times feel akin to Captain Jack Sparrow

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen demoed his P2P live streaming protocol at the San Francisco MusicTech Summit on Monday, which he said could potentially stream live video to millions of computers with no central infrastructure. Cohen said that the protocol could potentially be used for video conferencing, live streams of video game tournaments or even live sports events. “My goal here is to kill off television,” he joked.

Cohen has worked on P2P live streaming for a number of years, and told us a while back that he completely had to start from scratch because traditional P2P algorithms introduce too much latency for live applications. BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t said how exactly it intends to productize the protocol, but Cohen said on Monday that he is talking to a number of potential partners. BitTorrent has also started to run a number of  field tests on its website in recent months, streaming weekly live music events with the P2P protocol.

The ultimate winners of a P2P-based solution could be consumers, he argued, because it would enable publishers to put much more content online at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDNs. “Most of the video that people consume today is still not on the Internet,” said Cohen, adding that existing protocols aren’t set up to support big live events.

You’ve probably heard a lot about cord-cutting in recent years — though the data on this trend is still somewhat contradictory. With cable companies launching streaming apps, and streaming device makers looking to cable content, both sides of the TV-content coin are acknowledging the same thing: We’re not entirely sure yet that cord-cutting is a real phenomenon, there’s evidence that consumers want both cable TV and Internet streaming options, and the industry could stand to experiment a little bit while it all shakes out.

But for Roku, which brought the first Netflix-centric device to the market and has since sold around two and a half million boxes, it also means trying to take a greater stake on the hardware side. Basically, Wood said, his idea is that users will be able to get most if not all of their cable needs through a Roku product.

The article goes on to say Boxee is a cord-cutting tool, whereas Roku is eyeing the idea of a holistic TV-watching solution. Ultimately you need to decide which is more inline with your desires.

Now playing on Internet TV. Another example of how my horizons have been expanded by the fact I don't have a cable clicker anymore. More info on this dude from this NYTimes article

Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections).

Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song.

Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops.

One use for internet TV, albeit ill-advised.

Remember that whole network neutrality fight in the U.S. from 2009 and 2010? Well back then the issue was over applications hogging precious bandwidth, and ISPs hoping to charge the likes of Google, Netflix and others for the increasing traffic running across wireline and wireless pipes. Korea Telecom in South Korea has taken an interesting twist on the idea, and decided to block Samsung’s Smart TVs from accessing the Internet, according to this article from the Maeil Business Newspaper, a large S. Korean daily. That’s right, net neutrality isn’t just for applications anymore.

According to the story, KT cut off Samsung’s Smart TVs Friday morning after a dispute over how much data those TVs consume. From the story:

The dispute has been festering for a while as KT insists smart TVs share the costs of quality maintenance of the internet as they tend to hog the networks, while TV makers argue they have no obligation to do so.

oh man! I realize everyone wants to get paid, but C'mon now! I hope Comcast doesn't hear about this.

No matter what device you use to connect to the rich, luscious pastures of internet TV. Be aware that after you "Cut the Cord" a grandiose expanse of content and possibilities await you.

With all the talk surrounding Apple's rumored television set, it's easy to glance over the other companies tackling the so-called "Smart TV" space.

Of all the connected TVs, Blu-Ray players, Google TV boxes, video game consoles, etc., Roku has one of the most popular devices out there.

And they say they're just barely beating Apple in the space, at least in terms of how many boxes they've sold so far in the U.S. (However, we couldn't confirm specific numbers, so take that claim with a grain of salt.)

We had a chance to sit down with Roku's CEO Anthony Wood to get a look at how the company plans to stand out in a space that seems to be getting pretty crowded all of the sudden.

Most importantly, Wood says Roku's goal isn't to convince people to cut the cord from their cable companies and start streaming web content instead. Unlike Boxee, which actively encourages its users to cut the cord, Wood sees Roku as a layer on top of cable that adds more on-demand content via apps like Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora.

Don't Miss: Here's What Happens When You Cut The Cord From Cable For A Week

And cable companies are pretty cool with it, Wood says, despite the fact that Roku's internal stats show about 20% of its users cut back on cable channels and another 20% completely cancel cable. Wood hinted that Roku was in talks with companies to pipe their content through the Roku box, just like Verizon's Fios and Comcast do through the Xbox.

We had a Roku for a few weeks and were delighted with the picture and its ability to stream flawlessly via the apps it provides. However, with a PC hardwired to a TV you have so much more selectivity when it comes to streaming content. As a sports fan I am able to seek out streams of everything I had on cable prior to dropping it.

So for me, I have to advocate the albeit dirtier, but far richer approach of tying a PC to your TV.

As video consumption shifts from DVD to streaming, music consumption gravitates online, gaming goes on-demand, and a proliferation of cloud computing services ensures an almost constant stream of data flowing to and from our laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones, there's one obvious direction our overall internet consumption is heading: up. Way up. The companies that deliver our precious internet service to us see both a challenge and an opportunity: meet increasing demand, and make increasing revenue.

But are they going too far? Internet Service Providers in the U.S. have been steadily implementing usage-based billing and instituting bandwidth caps, a sort of online ultimatum: either your household uses less overall bandwidth than the cap allows each month, or you'll be slapped with a huge bill — or worse, termination of your internet service. The ISPs claim that as more people use more bandwidth, their infrastructure costs are going sky high — and yet the financial data shows that the cost of bandwidth has been falling for some years.

Comcast opened the door back in 2008 when it imposed a 250 GB bandwidth cap on its broadband users. Other large providers like Charter Communications followed suit with their own monthly limits, and most recently AT&T capped both their DSL and U-verse users earlier this year.

How does your ISP stack up in the bandwidth cap playing field, and what are the consequences if you exceed their imposed limits? Check out our guide below to help you stay on top of your household's internet usage. Are we missing your provider? Let us know in the comments!

As we advocate of IPTV it's most important element is your broadband provider. Here's a handy reference for you to peruse.