Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (SCEJ) has announced that the Torne DVR for the PS3 will be released in the nation next month, and will support Japan's terrestrial digital broadcasts.

The Torne connects via a USB port, and will allow users to record TV to the PS3 HDD or to external hard drives. Eight external drives can be registered to use the recorder.

The DVR will retail for the equivalent of $110, and Sony will bundle a 250GB PS3 with Torne for $470.

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Google has donated $2 million USD this week to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company behind Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary and Wikibooks.

Although the company was not in desperate need of money, the $2 million donation should be a welcome relief, regardless. Wikimedia raised $8 million for the year, after 230,000 people donated, on average, $33 USD.

Wikimedia communications chief Jay Walsh added: "Many have speculated as to the relationship between our organizations before, but with this news we're pleased to clarify their great role as a philanthropic supporter for the Foundation."

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Apple's iBook store will sell e-books protected with DRM, says the LA Times, with sources saying it will likely be FairPlay copy protection.

E-book market share leader Amazon has been criticized for using DRM for e-books they sell for the Kindle device, and it appears that Apple will employ the same tactics.

FairPlay will restrict the amount of devices that are authorized to read the e-book, with the number likely being between 3-5.

The iPad iBook store will sell the books in the open ePub standard. Five publishers have already signed deals to sell via the iBook store and have accepted FairPlay; Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette.

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Sony has announced the addition of Netflix streaming to its Dash personal Internet viewer, making all 17,000 "Watch Instantly" TV episodes and movies available through the device.

"We're continuing to develop innovative products that bring online music, news, video and more into our customers' homes in real time," says Brennan Mullin, senior vice president of Sony Electronics' personal imaging and audio business. "By adding content from Netflix and Demand Media to our dash product, Sony is giving consumers a new, convenient way to enjoy some of the highest quality entertainment and most useful information available on the Internet today."

The Dash has a 7-inch touchscreen and will be available starting April for $199.

Pic via Engadget:

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After months of delays, Google's proposed $134 million merger with video software compression company On2 has finally been accepted by On2 shareholders and the company says the deal should close on Friday.

From the press release:

Under the terms of the merger agreement, as amended, each outstanding share of On2 Common Stock (other than shares owned by (a) Google, Oxide Inc., Oxide LLC or On2 and (b) any On2 stockholders who are entitled to and who properly exercise appraisal rights under Delaware law) will be cancelled and extinguished and will be automatically converted into the right to receive (1) $0.15 in cash; (2) 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock; and (3) cash in lieu of any fractional share of Google Class A Common Stock (after aggregating all fractional shares of Google Class A Common Stock issuable to such On2 stockholders), without interest.

Google raised their offer by 20 percent last month.

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According to new Compete figures, Facebook has become the second most popular site in the United States, just barely surpassing Yahoo which has held the spot for some time.

The last time the top spots switched was in early 2008, when Google surpassed Yahoo.

Overall, 148 million US users visited Google in January, with Facebook seeing 133.6 million. Yahoo fell to third, at 132 million.

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Following in Netflix's footsteps, rental giant Redbox has agreed to wait 28 days before making new Warner releases available via their kiosks.

The delay will give Warner's "retail partners a period of exclusivity," which the studio hopes will help offset continued declines in DVD sales as well as give VOD a better chance at succeeding.

"The 28-day window for Redbox balances the economics of our relationship while continuing to offer great value to their customers," adds Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders. "This accord establishes a mutually beneficial relationship that will foster an ongoing and productive partnership."

With the agreement, Warner and Redbox have dropped any pending lawsuits against each other, as well.

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HBO has announced the launch of HBO Go, an online streaming video service that will allow users to watch the premium channel's exclusive content at their own leisure.

The only catch is you have to already be a subscriber to HBO or Cinemax TV services, but surely no one thought HBO would give away all these movies for free, right?

An advantage HBO has over competition in VOD is their popular exclusives like True Blood, Entourage and others.

So far it seems that subscribers will only be able to login to HBO Go if they are a Comcast or FiOS subscriber, and it is unclear when the service will be available to those not using those ISPs.

Screenshot via DigitalTrends:

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Boxee has announced the latest update to their beta service, version 0.9.20.10708, just about a month after the launch of the service.

The company says in the 37 days since launch, 150,000 new users have joined Boxee, 3 million apps were launched and 1.5 million movies or TV episodes were watched.

Although the update has little new features, it has over 500 bug fixes, which should make the service much more stable for the end user.

Says the company of bugs they fixed:

* Multilingual keyboard support: under settings->appearance->region to add keyboards
* Significantly improved video quality of our DXVA support
* Regained support for older graphics cards (pre-2.0 pixel shader) which was broken after move to DXVA
* Improved file scanning performance
* Hardware acceleration of H.264 on Intel HD4500 cards
* Hang on FLAC tag read over SMB
* SMB crashes when canceling SMB operations
* Hang on shutdown due to wait for SMB and file scanner
* Hang in file scanner when manually scanning a folder
* Hangs due to excessive locks around database pool
* Hangs when left idle due to UDP sockets leak
* Corrupted graphics on some ATI cards (X1600)
* Log file cycling (every 32M, old log overrides boxee.old.log)
* Present action dialog when clicking on DVD icon to allow browse/eject
* Optimization to file scanning making it less IO intensive
* Fixes to iPhone remote keyboard under Linux
* Added support for m4b playback (audio books)
* Crash in ID3 tag reading (playback and background scanning of some mp3 files)
* Crash in some wav files which contained extra-info in the wav header (playback and background scanning)
* Crash on some rss feeds caused by mis-parsing of empty http headers
* Crash on image extraction from mp3 tags (in some cases)
* win32: fixed runtime error in some cases where vc90 runtime was not installed properly
* Dual screen issues. sometimes a movie would only show black screen when switching screens.
* Allow apps to define properties for rtmp streaming
* Playback of some internet video streams, mainly coming from playlists (partial read of the network buffer was causing wrong codec detection)
* Playlist playback of internet video streams was sometimes using the music player instead of the video player
* Playback of music from history (was not working and now it will open the folder played from)
* Logout was broken enabling logging-in even after password change (was using stored cookie)
* Win32: when launching boxee while another instance is running it will just bring the other instance to front

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