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.

Amazon.com has officially jumped into the fray of subscription video-streaming services, charging into competition with Netflix and Hulu Plus, among others.

However, the Seattle-based retail giant is taking a different route than Netflix and Hulu. Whereas both of those services charge a monthly fee of $7.99, Amazon has added its streaming video to its Amazon Prime membership.

Until Tuesday, Amazon Prime was a $79-a-year offer that gave subscribers free two-day shipping as its main enticement. Now, U.S. Amazon Prime members can download about 5,000 movies and TV shows at no added cost. Amazon Prime's instant video can be watched via the Web browsers on computers, smart phones and tablets, as well as certain Blu-ray players and some set-top boxes such as the Roku.

Los Angeles Times reporter Ben Fritz covered the story this morning on the Company Town blog, writing:

Amazon has signed up two major studios, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. -- to provide older movies from their libraries -- along with 13 independent providers including the BBC, PBS, Magnolia Pictures, IFC and National Geographic.

The eclectic mix of content immediately available includes the movies "Hairspray," "The Human Centipede" and "Stripes" and the TV shows "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," "Bonanza" and "Farscape."

That's only a fraction of the content available to subscribers of Netflix, which has deals with every major film studio and a number of TV producers. Moreover, though most of Amazon Prime's content is more than a decade old, Netflix has much fresher titles, including movies less than a year old, thanks to deals with pay cable networks Starz and Epix.

Amazon, however, is in talks with every Hollywood studio and is said by people familiar with the matter to be seeking to grow its content selection with more and newer content.

Amazon has been planning its entry into the subscription-based streaming video market since last summer, Fritz said, noting that Netflix has more than 20 million subscribers with about two-thirds of them using the company's streaming option.

To read the rest of Fritz's report, head over to Company Town for Amazon launches Netflix-like streaming service with content from Warner Bros., Sony and independents.

RELATED:

Amazon working on subscription Web video service to take on Netflix

Netflix button coming to remote controls

-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screen shot of a listing for the movie "Bullitt," available for streaming to Amazon Prime members. Credit: Amazon.com

This is a corrected version of an earlier post. Changes are noted below.

D-Link's $200 Boxee Box is an impressive bit of engineering, bringing remarkable simplicity to the complex task of moving video and music from the Web or a home computer network to the TV screen. But for the time being, it suffers from the same limitations that afflict all the entrants in the online-TV derby: It's at best an alternative to cable TV, not a substitute for it.

That's not Boxee's or D-Link's fault as much as it is the reality of this moment in time, when many TV programmers are doing their best to protect cable and satellite operators from being undermined by the Net. Major TV titles either aren't available online or, if they're made available through Hulu, they're blocked from being displayed on a TV screen. (Not that it's always possible.)

The situation is gradually changing as Hollywood figures out how to make money from online distribution without sacrificing too much revenue from pay-TV services. Boxee has announced plans to add Hulu Plus, a $8-a-month service that includes much of what's currently on the broadcast TV networks and a handful of major cable outlets. And more cable TV content may become available (for a fee) as a byproduct of the Comcast-NBC Universal merger.

In the meantime, Boxee offers an overwhelming amount of made-for-the-Internet programming, plus the limited number of titles the networks have made available through their websites. And by overwhelming, I mean overwhelming.

The online television service Hulu's love-hate relationship with TV sets took a few twists this week. It's now easier to watch Hulu's programming on a big screen in your living room, but not necessarily in the way that Hulu's owners want you to.

As new set-top boxes emerged to bring online video to the TV screen -- e.g., Boxee and Roku -- Hulu altered its site to block these devices from displaying its free programs. That's because the studios and networks that own Hulu and supply it with programming were afraid of undermining the cable TV operators that pay them far more for their content than they were making from advertisers online.

In June, Hulu announced that it would test a paid version of its service ("Hulu Plus") that would work on set-top boxes, mobile phones and other previously shunned devices. The trial phase recently ended, and Hulu Plus is now widely available -- for example, it went live on Roku's devices this week. Better yet, Hulu dropped the price from $10 a month to $8.

But Hulu Plus is like a lock on the windows of a house whose door is open. As long as most of Hulu's programs remain available for free on the Web to people using a standard computer browser, clever tech companies will find a way to bring them to the TV set.

That's just what Oakland-based Orb has done.

It's been almost 15 years since WebTV brought the (dial-up) Internet to the (analog) TV screen, yet gadget makers are still trying to figure out how to make the concept compelling to the masses. The latest trend, epitomized by what Apple and Roku are doing, is lower-priced set-tops that rely largely on content stored on the Web (and, in Apple's case, your home computer). Hard-drive maker Western Digital, however, is going in the opposite direction. It's releasing a new version of its streaming-media set-top that has a built-in hard drive, which is intended to be used as a home media server.

The $200 WD TV Live Hub, which goes on sale Tuesday at Best Buy, is a logical extension of what Western Digital has been doing in the market. Its first set-top worked as sort of an external USB port for a digital TV, enabling people to display content from a thumb drive, camera or camcorder on the TV screen. It then added an Ethernet port to the box so it could connect to a home network and the Internet, bringing an increasing number of websites into the living room (e.g., Pandora and Netflix). The latest step was to add a 1 terabyte hard drive and software that lets the box stream media across the network.

Hard drives are Western Digital's core business, so maybe the real surprise here is that it took the company so long to add one to its WD TV products. But Dale Pistilli, a marketing vice president at the company, said the drive helps improve the box in at least two ways.

Full disclosure up front: I'm cheap. I went without cable for years before signing up for Sezmi's $20-a-month plan, a concession I made mainly to silence my kids' incessant demands for Cartoon Network. (Curse you, Ben Tennyson!!!) We'd also gotten by just fine without a TiVo, as miraculous a device as it is, because Hulu and similar offerings from the networks obviate the need for a recorder. With all the shows available online, a computer in the kitchen is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a TV in the kitchen.

But Hulu has to pay its bills, right? And it's been under pressure from some television programmers, particularly the ones that don't want to undermine the combination of advertising and subscription revenues they get from cable TV, to generate more dollars from viewers. So it was inevitable that Hulu would come out with a premium tier (or tiers) that carried a subscription fee.

I just didn't expect Hulu Plus to be so, well, lame.

For $10 a month (OK, $9.99), Hulu Plus offers a full season's worth of episodes from this year's broadcast TV lineup (the free Hulu typically offers just the latest five episodes of each program), access to a variety of older TV series ("Roswell"! "Miami Vice"! "Quantum Leap"!) and the ability to watch Hulu on selected devices (iPhones, iPads, Xbox 360s, PlayStation 3s and certain connected TVs and Blu-ray players). In other words, it's a larger collection of content from the current providers, plus a limited degree of space shifting. For $120 a year (OK, $119.88).

That doesn't move me. I could easily see paying for content from higher-value programmers not currently available online, such as HBO and FX. And I could imagine paying for true portability -- downloadable files that could be viewed on the device of my choice. But compared with what Netflix offers for $9 a month (OK, $8.99), Hulu Plus just isn't compelling.

Of course, that's just one (parsimonious) man's opinion. What's yours?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher threw a curveball at NBC Universal's chief executive Thursday in hearings regarding the proposed merger of NBCU and Comcast. The Virginia Democrat asked Jeff Zucker why Hulu blocked the Boxee app from displaying its content last year.

Boxee is an application that lets users connect a computer (or soon, a standalone box) to their television to stream TV shows, movies and online video.

Boucher resurfaced an issue that enraged early adopters of the media center a year ago when Hulu announced that it would block the Boxee software from picking up its video content. In the recent versions of Boxee, access to shows on Hulu has been restored in addition to an option to watch them through networks' proprietary video players.

"What about Boxee?" Boucher asked Zucker. "Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?"

Trying to protect the revenue they collect from cable operators, the Hollywood studios that own Hulu have stopped the online TV and movie outlet from working with "over-the-top" companies such as Boxee that bring video from the Web to the living room. But as set manufacturers equip more of their models with Ethernet jacks and the software necessary to act as displays on a home network, there's just no holding Hulu back.

Consider MediaMall Technologies' PlayOn, a $40 program that enables people to stream programming from Hulu to their TV sets via their computers. (The software's server also can transmit videos from YouTube, CBS, Netflix and several other online sources.) Today, PlayOn relies on a game console (Wii, XBox 360 or PlayStation 3) or a DLNA-compliant set-top box (e.g., Moxi's digital video recorders) to decode the streams for a TV set. But with set-makers equipping more and more of their models with Ethernet jacks and home-networking software, PlayOn is increasingly able to send shows straight to the TV screen. "Unquestionably, the notion of getting online [programming] into the living room is a very good trend for us," MediaMall Jim Holland said at a CES event Thursday night.

Holland also offered a few statistics that confirm some of the studios' fears about Hulu on the TV screen. About 40% of MediaMall's customers said they used PlayOn daily, with Hulu being the most popular source of programming by far. In addition, 38% said they had either significantly reduced or canceled their cable subscriptions; of that group, almost 80% said they were still watching their favorite programs in spite of the cable-cutting. 

Another way to watch Hulu on a TV is to connect a computer directly to your set. Laptop makers have tried to encourage this trend by equipping their models with digital-TV-friendly HDMI outputs instead of just a VGA plug. At CES, Alereon Inc., which makes chips that send information in the Ultra Wideband spectrum, offered a simpler (albeit pricier) alternative: a stubby USB dongle that can transmit programming wirelessly from a PC or laptop to an antenna attached to a TV's HDMI input.

The signal travels 20 to 25 feet and can pass through walls, although the most likely use is to beam programming from the couch to the TV, said Eric Broockman, Alereon's chief executive. He added that the unit is expected to be available by April for less than $200.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Boxee unveiled plans at an event in New York tonight for the next generation of its Web TV software and the first steps of a strategy for invading the set-top box arena.

Details of what's being called the Boxee Box are still trickling out of the sold-out Beta Unveiling event at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, which has taken 1,880 RSVPs. We'll update the post as we learn more.

Boxee Chief Executive Avner Ronen gave The Times a brief rundown last week on the company's plans for infiltrating the hardware business as well as a preview of the beta version of the Boxee software, which will be available to a limited number of testers this month and to everyone in January.

Contrary to initial speculation, there is no official Boxee Box. The new device is being developed in partnership with a third party, and Boxee expects to strike several more of those deals with other manufacturers next year. Boxee doesn't charge hardware makers to install the software on its devices.

Ronen had his ideal specification list for the first set-top box to ship with Boxee -- 1080P high-def support, an HDMI TV connection and a price tag of less than $200.

[Updated, 5:45 p.m.: D-Link has signed on as the maker of the first Boxee Box.

It's a little black cube designed by the same company that thought up the Xbox 360. The box sports two USB ports, wired and wireless Internet connectivity, an optical digital audio port and, as we described earlier, an HDMI port.

The device seems to lack any significant internal storage. D-Link places an emphasis on streaming but offers storage via an SD memory card.

The Boxee Box will be available in the second quarter of next year for about $200. We're disappointed that D-Link missed the obvious name -- Box-D. The device will be on display at CES.

"Boxee's not a hardware company," said Boxee Chief Product Officer Zach Klein. "It's a software company."]

The first box will ship with the then-latest version of the media center software. Based on the demo we saw of the Boxee beta, it's finally poised to take over the living room.

Click the "continue reading" button for a breakdown of some of the coolest new features in the beta, which you'll soon be able to install on Apple TVs or Mac Minis.