After a year on AOL's board, former William Morris chief executive Jim Wiatt is ramping up his commitment to helping the online media company in Hollywood. 

Wiatt is leaving his board seat to spend most of his time as a consultant to AOL, using his clout in the media business to advise the company on creating star-branded online video content and courting advertisers.

"We're seeing a very large migration of content and talent towards digital media," said AOL's chief executive, Tim Armstrong, in an interview Wednesday.  "What we're hoping to do with Jim and with AOL is speed up that migration and have AOL step in the forefront of digital content and partnerships."

After a year of cost-cutting following its split with Time Warner, AOL has been aggressively trying to reinvent itself as a primary online video and news destination.  Its recent efforts include a Jonas Brothers-centric Web video portal called Cambio.com, and an online distribution partnership with "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

"You look at companies like Google that are so powerful in delivering content and see this is really in its infancy," Wiatt said in the interview.  "It's not going to be long before all forms of content are going to be available through multiple distribution systems."

"So many people are coming toward AOL already wanting to do things," he added, "it's really trying to make decisions on who are the best and brightest in making video and other kinds of content."

Armstrong said that Wiatt had been a close advisor to himself and other AOL executives over the last year, and that Wiatt's position on the board wasn't adequately taking advantage of his potential value.

"Most board members are doing six or eight meetings a year," Armstrong said. "Jim was doing six or eight meetings a week."

Armstrong added that AOL is watching recent Internet TV efforts by Google and Apple with a careful eye on how his company can become a player in the broadband TV space.

"It's not hard to imagine a place in the next five or 10 years where plasma TVs -- driven by an on-demand format -- are the primary way people consume media," Armstrong said.  "If you look at how quickly people are moving to those kinds of services, content needs to follow."

"By announcing Jim's helping AOL, that's a space we'd really like to tackle," Armstrong said.

-- David Sarno

Photo: Jim Wiatt. Credit: AOL

A worker makes adjustments to the Panasonic booth at the Consumer Electronics Show, where DirecTV and Panasonic announced a partnership to offer all-3D satellite channels. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

The three channels will be made available to DirecTV’s HDTV subscribers, bringing movies, TV shows and live events to homes in 3-D.

A Panasonic executive said pricing has not been set. But at least one of the channels would be made available to the subscribers at no additional cost. The two companies have formed a strategic partnership to create the channels.

One of the major barriers for 3-D TV has been a lack of content. In December, a standard was announced for 3-D Blu-ray machines to make it practical for movies to be issued in the format.

But this is the first announcement by a U.S. content provider that it would bring a steady supply of 3-D to its customers. One of the first live sports events to be shown on the 3-D channel will be the Major League Baseball All-star game this summer, according to a DirecTV official.

To view 3-D programming at home, viewers will need specially equipped television sets. Panasonic, which has been at the forefront of bringing 3-D to living rooms, will be offering 3-D enabled sets and Blu-ray players.

Of course, 3-D glasses will be needed to view the channels.

-- David Colker

Does it really matter that the LCD TV has a contrast ratio of 40,000:1 or that the digital camera has a 12-megapixel resolution?

David Colker gets to the bottom of these befuddling questions ahead of the holiday shopping season. He offers an in-depth gadget guide that doesn't make suggestions about what to buy but about how to buy.

--Peter Pae

Sharp LCD TVs could get an image-boosting improvement in contrast. Photo: Bloomberg.

Ever since LCD flat-panel televisions became popular, videophiles have complained they lack one major thing -- true black.

The technology can't, like old-fashioned tube TVs, display an absence of illumination that can be part of a night scene or other apt situation. Plasma TVs come much closer to showing true black, as the experts call it, but with LCDs there's always a hint of gray, and this throws off the image contrast.

But this week, Sharp Corp. said it had developed an LCD technology that eliminates "light leakage," according to a company release, "making it possible to display extremely deep blacks." The new regimen, which Sharp calls UV²A technology, is so precise that it can control the tilt of liquid crystal molecules only about two nanometers in size. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. 

Also, Sharp says the technology is more efficient and will save energy while still producing bright images with vivid colors.

No word on prices or when televisions using UV²A will become available, but Sharp says it will start making the new LCD panels at two of its plants.

It's far too early to know how much real-world difference the technology will make our living rooms, if any.

-- David Colker