Bamboom Labs wants to help people cut their cable cords by putting local TV broadcasts online with all the digital trimmings -- that is, the ability to watch live or recorded shows in high definition on any device with a browser, anywhere a broadband connection is available. It's technologically ingenious, but I can't decide whether it's a service the market has been waiting for or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or maybe it's a solution to a problem not many people are eager to solve.

The New York-based startup is the brainchild of Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia, former chief executive of Navic Networks, whose technology in set-top boxes enabled cable and broadcast networks to measure audience demographics and match advertisements to them in real time. His time at Navic taught him that at any given moment, about half of pay TV viewers were tuned in to local broadcast channels. That observation led him to believe that if he could get live broadcast signals to people reliably, with the ability to time-shift shows and watch them on any device, and with the social features of the Internet, they'd be more willing to abandon cable and satellite TV.

Other companies have taken on parts of this challenge. For example, Sling Media makes set-top boxes that let people tune in remotely to the TV service they have at home. And Monsoon Multimedia makes set-tops that combine remote viewing with TiVo-like digital video recording. But those devices build off of the programming that pay TV delivers to homes. Kanojia wanted to let people watch local broadcasts  through the Net without the help of pay TV.

Here's where things get complicated.

While Time Warner Cable and Cablevision deliver conventional television programming to their customers' iPads, other companies are trying to use the tablet to redefine what TV might be. A good example is the San Francisco-based Remixation, the company behind Vodpod, which unveils an intriguing online video application for the iPad Wednesday.

The free app, Showyou, enables people to create and watch personalized streams of online video. Instead of relying on the talents of TV studios and network programming executives, it draws from user-generated content sites (YouTube, Vimeo and TED at the moment) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Vodpod). And it takes advantage of the touch screen on the iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch) to make it easier to navigate through the grid of shows, rather than the up-down and left-right buttons of a TV remote.

The short-term goal is to be "the best app on your phone or your tablet for finding video and sharing it with your friends," Chief Executive Mark Hall said. But "the more provocative long-term vision" is to become a prime-time TV alternative.

LG's Internet-connected TVs will soon be displaying content from Brightcove, a popular online video platform for businesses and news agencies.

Brightcove Inc., which has more than 2,700 customers in 50 countries, will roll out a software development kit later this year that will enable it users to build video-playing apps for LG's NetCast software.

Among the Cambridge, Mass.-based company's customers are the Discovery Channel, General Motors, the New York Times, Ticketmaster and Reebok.

"Consumer electronics companies, such as our partner LG, are creating the largest global distribution network into the living room," said Eric Elia, Brightcove's vice-president of TV solutions, in a blog post. "SmartTV, as LG calls their platform, is to the TVs of yore like smart phones are to feature phones."

Elia noted that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has forecasted that 106 million Internet-ready TVs will be sold in 2012 -- each being an outlet for online video distribution.

Financial terms of the deal, or how long it will last, weren't disclosed by either LG or Brightcove on Wednesday.

The deal to distribute content on LG's NetCast TVs is Brightcove's first pairing with a TV maker, though it can distribute video on set-top boxes such as the Boxee Box.

Brightcove also offers video players compatible with Adobe Flash and HTML5, in addition to mobile operating systems such as Apple's iOS, Google Android, Nokia's Symbian, HP WebOS, Windows Phone, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry phones -- as well as Facebook and YouTube.

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Online TV service Ivi loses a round in court

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

A federal judge in New York ordered Internet TV service Ivi to shut down Tuesday, finding that it violated the copyrights of a group of broadcasters and Major League Baseball. It was yet another example of a tech company trying in vain to stretch the boundaries of copyright law to avoid paying as much for content as its more conventional competitors.

Ivi TV captured the broadcasts of 55 stations in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York, then retransmitted them through the Internet to subscribers for a fee of just under $5 a month. For an additional 99 cents a month, viewers could pause, rewind and fast-forward shows, although they could not record them for later viewing.

Copyright law gives cable operators the right to carry broadcast stations if several conditions are met, and provided that they pay a small portion of their revenue in royalties. But the law also requires that cable operators abide by Federal Communications Commissions regulations, which (among other things) give broadcasters the right to demand higher fees for retransmission rights.

Ivi argued that it was a cable system entitled to carry broadcast signals, but also that it was an Internet service and so immune from FCC regulation. As such, it argued that it could retransmit stations online while paying royalties -- about $100 a year, according to U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald's ruling. Major League Baseball and two dozen broadcasters and studios (including two arms of the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times) sued, arguing that Internet-based services aren't cable systems and as such are not entitled to an automatic (or "compulsory") retransmission license.

Buchwald agreed, granting a preliminary injunction against Ivi. She held that Congress created the compulsory license for local cable systems, not national (or global) operators online, and did so within a larger regulatory framework:

Congress legislated with an understanding that the cable systems it was granting a compulsory license to would also be subject to the regulations of the FCC.... [N]o company or technology which refuses to abide by the rules of the FCC has ever been deemed a cable system for purposes of the Copyright Act. Significantly, companies such as AT&T U-Verse, which claim to operate outside of the jurisdiction of the Communications Act, still comply with these rules, most significantly by obtaining retransmission consent.

She also said that if Ivi's interpretation of the law were taken to its logical conclusion, the result would be absurd:

As plaintiffs argue, defendants’ view of Section 111 essentially means that anyone with a computer, Internet connection, and TV antenna can become a “cable system” for purposes of Section 111. It cannot be seriously argued that this is what Congress intended.

Ivi had a number of supporters among pro-technology public-interest groups, which argued that Ivi benefited the public by providing more competition to incumbent cable and satellite TV services. But Buchwald held that the law doesn't hold the door open to online competitors, who cannot enter the market without the permission of the broadcasters whose signals they seek to retransmit.

The company and its allies also tried to persuade the court not to act until the lawsuit could go to trial, arguing that Ivi is too small to divert a meaningful amount of advertising away from broadcast TV in the interim. Buchwald pointedly disagreed:

Defendants cannot seriously argue that the existence of thousands of companies who legitimately  use plaintiffs’ programming and pay full freight means that Ivi’s illegal and uncompensated use does not irreparably harm plaintiffs. Likewise, they cannot contend that since Ivi is small and plaintiffs are large, they should be allowed to continue to steal plaintiffs’ programming for personal gain until a resolution of this case on the merits. Such a result leads to an unacceptable slippery slope.

It's easy to understand why companies like Ivi keep trying to find ways to deliver TV signals despite the limits imposed by time, space and contracts. Live broadcast television remains the most popular video medium in U.S. homes, attracting the biggest audiences and generating the most advertising dollars. Only a few companies have found a way to do so without running afoul of TV industry lawyers -- TiVo and Sling being two good examples. Others, such as ReplayTV and ICraveTV, have not. Buchwald's decision Tuesday was just a preliminary one, but she moved Ivi much closer to the latter category than the former.

[Updated at 2:22 p.m.: Ivi TV Chief Executive Todd Weaver responded to the ruling with a statement. Here's the money quote:

Judge Buchwald's opinion is premised on her statement that ivi is 'not complying with the rules and regulations of the FCC'. This conclusion is simply false, as ivi has met with the all the commisioner's offices of the FCC repeatedly and has received assurances that we are in full and complete compliance. Judge Buchwald makes the legal mistake of misinterpreting the copyright law to instead make communications policy. Communications policy is the province of the FCC and, by basing a judicial copyright decision on communications regulations to be administered by the FCC, the judge is overstepping her constitutional authority.]

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

HTC unveiled the Flyer, its first tablet, on Tuesday in Barcelona, Spain, during the Mobile World Congress event.

With the Flyer, HTC seems to be aiming for a higher-end feel with an aluminum body, a 7-inch touchscreen and a quick 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm.

The device, which is set to hit retail stores in the second quarter of the year, will come with 32 gigabytes of storage and connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, as well as 3G and 4G HSPA+ networks.

Android Honeycomb will not be pre-installed on the Flyer, but users will be able to upgrade to the tablet-optimized version of Android from Android Gingerbread, a build of Google's operating system designed for smart phones.

HTC's Sense interface for Android makes its way from the company's phones over to the Flyer with the recognizable time and weather widget on the home screen.

Apps can also be run in a split-screen view, allowing a user to use two apps at the same time -- say the Website for a record store where a user can get an address, split with Google maps to locate it and find directions.

A digital pen will be packed with the Flyer for drawing and writing in certain apps on the tablet in what the company is calling HTC Scribe technology.

A 5-megapixel camera is on the back of the tablets, while a 1.3-megapixel camera can be found on the front for use with video chat software such as Skype.

The tablet will also be the first device offered with the company's HTC Watch video download service.

HTC described the service as "low-cost, on-demand progressive downloading of hundreds of High-Definition movies from major studios."

Another interesting addition is video games through OnLive, the cloud-based gaming service for laptops and TVs. HTC said users will be able to connect the Flyer to television sets to play games via OnLive, or games can be played directly on the tablet.

HTC didn't mention how games that have previously required the use of a video game controller on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 would be played on the tablet, but promised titles such as Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, NBA 2K11 and Lego Harry Potter.

Below is a marketing video HTC posted on YouTube for the Flyer.

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Sprint turns on 4G service in Los Angeles, Miami and Washington

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Top photo: An HTC employee demos the new Flyer tablet computer at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday. Credit: Denis Doyle/Bloomberg

Bottom: HTC Flyer. Credit: HTC

The air is almost as thick with data as it once was with the smoke of the Industrial Revolution, with increasingly dense billows of bits traveling between the world's billions of mobile devices.

In 2010 alone, the amount of mobile data sent was 2.6 times what it was in 2009. And by 2015, people will send 26 times more mobile data than they do now, according to Cisco's annual Global Mobile Traffic Forecast.

That will mean 6.3 exabytes per month, said Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing. "That's the equivalent of every man, woman and child on Earth sending 1,000 text messages every second," he said.

Yipes, better upgrade my plan!

Cisco says two-thirds of that data traffic will come from mobile video, as more people begin making video calls, sending each other clips they've recorded, and watching longer-form television and movies on their cellphones and tablets.

For a little perspective: Mobile traffic in 2010 was three times as large as all the world's combined Internet traffic in 2000. In short, mobile broadband is getting big -- everywhere.

"There are regions in the world where they have mobile Internet connectivity but are not on the electrical grid," said Doug Webster, Cisco's senior director of service provider marketing. "The Internet is breaking the electrical barrier."

The growth of mobile networks will come with an increase in wireless speeds too. The global average is about 200 kilobits per second now, but as more so-called 4G networks are erected around the world, the average will increase by a factor of 10, to about 2.2 megabits per second. That's on the low end of what home broadband brings today -- pretty astonishing, considering it includes mobile networks in all of the world's developing countries.

But not all of the data explosion is going to come from the rise in smart phones and tablets. In 2015, Cisco predicts, most of the mobile traffic will still come from laptops and netbooks (56%), while smart phones will account for about 27%, and tablets only about 3.5% of the traffic growth.

Cisco makes its predictions by pooling various sources, including data compiled by research firms, polling its own infrastructure of Internet servers, and sampling the data habits of more than 390,000 users who run Cisco's Global Internet Speed Test smart-phone application.

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Egypt may have turned off the Internet one phone call at a time

-- David Sarno

Photo: A giant bubble of interstellar gamma rays discovered by NASA's Fermi telescope. Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video/Flickr

Google Chrome is going to drop H.264 video codec, dumping arguably the most popular video standard currently on the Internet in favor of WebM, a format it created.

The move has stirred anger, with many comparing Google's dropping of H.264 with Apple's abandonment of Adobe Flash.

Among those who have spoken out against Google's decision is Microsoft evangelist Tim Sneath, who in a tweet likened the decision to despotism.

Sneath's Twitter message linked to a blog post he wrote comparing the move with abandoning English in favor of Klingon, titling the post "An Open Letter From the President of the United States of Google."

Ars Technica called the move "a step backward for openness."

Jason Perlow, writing on ZDNet, speculated that the move had more to do with future infrastructure costs for Google's Web video behemoth YouTube than what's best for the Internet.

According to TechCrunch, H.264 format video made up about 66% of the video on the Web. H.264 is royalty free as long as it's distributed for free; otherwise, companies have to pay a licensing fee to MPEG LA, the group that owns the patents on the format.

WebM is a royalty-free video standard, with no current licensing fees in any form, and its list of backers includes Adobe, Mozilla (builder of the popular Firefox browser) and Opera, among others.

Apple and Microsoft are huge supporters of H.264. Abode Flash isn't yet compatible with Google's WebM video format, though it is compatible with H.264 video. But Adobe has said WebM friendliness is on its way.

Flash, a downloadable add-on for many Web browsers, is baked into Google's Chrome browser, leading to others, such as John Gruber of Daring Fireball, to call Google a hypocrite for embracing one not-open standard while shelving another.

So why is Google doing this? The company said Tuesday it was focusing on more open video standards -- those being its own WebM codec and the little used Theora standard.

The move is merely the latest in what is a never-ending battle to determine what the future of the Web will look like and what technologies and formats will power it.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies," Google Chrome product manager Mike Jazayeri said in a blog post announcing the move.

"These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: a screen shot of a Twitter message from Tim Sneath of Microsoft condemning Google's plan to drop H.264 video from Chrome. Credit: Los Angeles Times

One trend on display at last week's Consumer Electronics Show was the gradual expansion in online content available on connected TVs. Major set manufacturers continue to confine their sets to a walled garden of sites and apps that they have approved, but the turf is expanding and the barriers to entry are dropping. For example, manufacturers are making application development kits widely available, instead of just providing them to selected software companies.

Meanwhile, upstarts continued to announce products or technologies designed to bring the entire unfiltered Web to the TV screen. Two particularly clever ones came from Orb and Snapstick.

The former recently started selling a $99 device, called Orb TV, that enables people to stream shows from Hulu and other websites to their TV sets, circumventing the problems that have stopped the free version of Hulu from being displayed by the Boxee box and similar set-tops.

Its follow-up, which was announced at CES, is a $19.95 disc that in effect turns any Blu-ray player with BD Live functionality (including those in a PlayStation 3) into an Orb TV device. Like the Orb TV, the Orb BR software relies on a smart phone or a laptop to act as the remote control. Unlike the Orb TV, though, it's capable of delivering video to the TV screen in high definition.

(I can't resist noting how entrepreneurs keep coming up with uses for BD Live functionality that Hollywood studios and consumer electronics companies didn't have in mind when they were drawing up the standard. But then, that's the beauty of standards.)

Snapstick doesn't have actual products yet, just SplitMedia technology that it demonstrated and a deal it announced with D-Link to conduct a trial of SplitMedia in an undisclosed product this year. Here's how it works: Users select a video to watch by browsing the Web on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop running Snapstick's software. Then, with a shake of the phone or a swipe on their computer, they can send what they're watching wirelessly to a Snapstick-equipped set-top box connected to the TV set.

Bob Patterson, a spokesman for Snapstick, said users could send the video to multiple screens simultaneously, provided they were all connected to a set-top running Snapstick's software, and all were logged in to the same account. One advantage of the software, he said, is that it doesn't rely on the smart phone or laptop to stream content from the Web. Once a video is snapped to the TV, the phone or laptop is free to be used for something else -- say, sending snarky tweets about what you're watching.

The show also featured a number of companies that simply make it easier to connect a computer to a digital TV set, essentially turning the TV into a big computer monitor. For example, iGugu's $99 InterneTV consists of cables to connect the PC to the TV and a remote control with a QWERTY keyboard that can be operated with one hand. And Veebeam's products ($99 and $139 for standard definition and high definition, respectively) consist of a USB dongle that beams video from a PC or laptop to a set-top box plugged into an HDTV.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The ability to rip CDs helped transform music consumption (and, some would argue, hasten the demise of CD sales) by making songs more portable and accessible. That revolution hasn't come to DVDs -- it takes more technical savvy to convert a movie disc into an easily playable file, and it's illegal in the U.S. to make software or devices to help people do that. Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, at least one device maker demonstrates a new way to get around that hurdle (this year's entry: Moovida), but stiff opposition from the studios (and their lawyers) has stopped most of those products from reaching the masses.

At this year's show, though, studio executives opened the door to retailers converting their customers' DVD collections into movie files stored online. Such conversion services are a likely part of Ultraviolet, the online video distribution initiative by a consortium of studios, tech companies, retailers and service providers. The first UV products and services are expected to hit the market later this year.

The catch is that the files stored online would be confined to Ultraviolet's walled garden, playable only on devices compatible with UV's standards. So it's not clear at this point what compatibility problems might emerge. But with companies expected to develop UV-compliant applications and players for a wide variety of computers, mobile devices and set-top boxes, the disc-to-cloud conversion is likely to appeal to at least some movie collectors.

It's those consumers -- the ones willing to spend the extra dollars to buy a movie instead of just renting it -- who are critical to the success of UV. The consortium's platform is designed to promote movie sales by eliminating many of the off-putting restrictions that the studios impose on downloadable movies without abandoning the limits on copying and sharing that Hollywood demands.

UV-certified downloads can be shared between UV-certified devices and streamed to Internet-connected PCs, TVs and mobile devices running software that meets UV's specifications. And UV-branded Blu-ray discs and DVDs will come with "a copy in the cloud" that can be streamed, downloaded or burned to a disc, said Thomas Gewecke, president of digital distribution for Warner Bros.

But what about all the discs people already own? Several UV backers said they expected to see retailers offer consumer the chance to convert existing discs into UV files stored online. But "we don't know what form yet that's going to take," said John D. Calkins, executive vice president of global digital and commercial innovation for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. "Nobody's figured out ... how you go at that opportunity."

Among the unknowns are what price, if any, consumers might be willing to pay for such a service and what compensation, if any, the studios would demand for the right to make a copy in the cloud. Nor is it clear how hard it would be to verify that the DVDs being converted were ones that had been bought. Ultimately, the lower the bar that studios and retailers set for converting DVDs, the more likely they'll be to draw movie collectors into the UV fold.

The prospect of converting DVDs opens up all sorts of new opportunities for retailers -- for example, the ability to sell UV-compliant digital storage units pre-loaded with the customer's entire movie collection. So retailers can be expected to push to make DVD conversion a reality. Whether consumers respond to the offer remains to be seen.

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DECE turns Ultraviolet

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for the Los Angeles Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

This week's Consumer Electronics Show has been a coming-out party for Ultraviolet, the online video-distribution platform backed by a consortium of major Hollywood studios, device makers, retailers and service providers. But while leaders of the consortium -- the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem -- were outlining their plans in a packed conference room at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Thursday afternoon, Bram Cohen was privately demonstrating a new streaming technology based on the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol in a Vegas hotel suite.

The company Cohen co-founded, BitTorrent Inc., also announced Thursday a partnership with Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, an influential tech R&D center, to develop standards for playing back BitTorrent downloads on a wide range of consumer electronics. It's conceivable that when Ultraviolet-compatible devices hit the market (probably in 2012), some will also bear the logo, "BitTorrent Certified."

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge faced by backers of Ultraviolet. The platform, which the studios hope will breathe life into sluggish sales of downloadable films and TV shows, has to compete with file-sharing software and hosting sites that let people download or stream unauthorized copies of just about anything for free.

Ultraviolet promises a dramatic improvement over the first generation of download-to-own services. But the developments at BitTorrent Inc. show that file-sharing applications are advancing too. And while UV starts from an installed base of zero, more than 20 million people around the world use BitTorrent daily, and more than 100 million use it monthly, BitTorrent Inc. announced earlier this week.

It's important to note that BitTorrent Inc. -- one of several companies that distributes software based on the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol Cohen developed years ago -- doesn't actively encourage piracy, even though that's what most people use the technology for. In fact, the new version of its software, due this spring, will promote more prominently the content that some (typically non-Hollywood) filmmakers and recording artists are distributing via BitTorrent.