Skype has announced this week that they will be offering free calling for a month in countries that have World Cup soccer teams.

The deals vary, but subscribers for the most part will have free minutes or unlimited minutes to call landlines in their countries for 30 days.

If you are American, the deal is better, with unlimited minutes to call mobile phones and landlines for the month.

The deal will likely only last until the end of the World Cup festivities, and you must have a Skype account.

Deals by country:

60 minutes free calls to landlines in Algeria for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Argentina for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Australia for a month
400 minutes free calls to landlines in Brazil for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Cameroon for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Chile for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Denmark for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in France for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Germany for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Ghana for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Greece for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines and mobiles in Honduras
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Italy for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines and mobiles in Japan for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Mexico for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in the Netherlands for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in New Zealand for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Nigeria for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Paraguay for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Serbia for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Portugal for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Slovakia for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Slovenia for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in South Africa for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in South Korea for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in Spain for a month
120 minutes free calls to landlines in Switzerland for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines in the UK for a month
60 minutes free calls to landlines in Uruguay for a month
Unlimited free calls to landlines and mobiles in the USA for a month

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According to BusinessWeek, popular streaming content destinationHulu is in talks with CBS and Viacom to add their content to the upcoming premium Hulu service.

Currently, CBS is the only major broadcaster to not have an ownership stake in Hulu, but that may change in September, when the premium Hulu begins, giving users a chance to watch full catalogs of content as long as they pay a small monthly subscription fee.

Hulu will keep the free, ad-based service available too, but as most users have already noticed, you can only watch the trailing five episodes of a current season using the free site.

"Charging a subscription is possibly Hulu's best way to improve its library of TV shows and films,"adds Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia.

Hulu would not comment on the speculation.

All of the owners of Hulu revenue share advertising dollars and would do the same for subscription fees.

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VLC has been updated to version 1.1, making the popular media player "ready for HD" with hardware video acceleration leading to smoother HD playback.

Additionally, the update brings support for the WebM video standard alongside tons of other tweaks and fixes.

On the downside, VLC has been forced to remove SHOUTcast streaming protocol support, as AOL (the owner) had demanded that the company bundle AOL software into the player or remove the support. VLC has left the email addresses of prominent AOL execs on their page, however, so angry users can do what they will with that.

The hardware acceleration works, so far, only through Nvidia hardware for both Linux and Windows, but all other updates work for Macs, Windows and Linux.

VLC is free and available here: VLC Media Player 1.1

What's new?
GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
Improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs
Support for new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8
NB: so far, on Windows for GPU decoding, VideoLAN is recommending nVidia® GPU, until ATI® drivers are working with VLC architecture, and until the VLC developers get access to some Intel® hardware supporting GPU decoding.

Other Improvements:

Web improvements
Support for WebM decoding and encoding
Improved web plugins
Better streaming capabilities
Better Audio experience
Integrated playlist in the Qt4 interface
Multiple views (like album art) in the playlist in the Qt4 interface
Support for AMR-NB, Mpeg-4 ALS, Vorbis 6.1/7.1, FLAC 6.1/7.1 and WMAS
CDDB and CD-Text works now on the Windows port when listening to CD-Audio
Support for DVD-Audio files (.aob)
Improved meta-data and album-art support
Faster, Lighter
Faster decoding, with up to 40% speed-ups, in HD resolutions
First part of the Video Output core rewrite
Removal or rewrite of dozens of modules, code simplification and tens of thousands of lines of code removed
Some functionalities that are less used are now moved to extensions
More assembly optimizatinons, especially SSSE3/SSE4 and ARM Neon
Fewer threads used
Better for developers
Simplified and improved libVLC, removal of exceptions for better C integration
New phonon-backend for Qt applications, on all platforms
New C++ bindings

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