Apple Inc., preparing to announce a new set-top box that delivers TV to consumers, will include movies from Netflix Inc., according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
The streaming service would be available on the revamped version of Apple TV, due to be introduced tomorrow in San Francisco, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been made public. Users would pay a subscription fee to Netflix (more…)

But it didn’t last too long as Apple has removed the Grooveshark iPhone app from the App Store yesterday, due to a complaint they received from Universal Music Group UK.
Grooveshark is a free web based music streaming service that allows users to upload, share and stream tracks from a massive catalog of songs. The new iPhone app will allow their Premium/VIP members of the service use their iPhone to search for music from the huge database. Additionally, (more…)

While this feature has existed for over a month now, a number of bloggers have now started wondering if this could be Cupertino's latest leap towards the launch of an
. In a recent article on
, blogger Brian Barrett writes:
“Well this was unexpected: Apple has quietly enabled its devices to stream music to iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches from online storage through iDisk. It's the very next-best thing to putting iTunes in the cloud.”
(more…)

As early testers have noted, iPad's native Youtube app downscales both the standard and HD version of videos to low resolution while rendering over the 3G network. This is also the case with other apps like Netflix where videos are downsampled to pretty low resolutions.
however notes that iTunes video previews continue to be rendered at high resolution.
In what may come as further disappointment to users, iLounge also notes that some third-party
(more…)

Steve Swasey, VP of Corporate Communications, here. Terrific response to our news today about Netflix on the iPad. For those of you asking whether Netflix will be on the iPhone and iPod Touch: We wouldn't invite you to dinner without planning to serve dessert. In other words, we're working on it so stay tuned.
So Netflix subscribers will soon be able to get streaming movies and TV shows on their iPhone . Swasey hasn’t provided a release (more…)

Nevertheless, concerns about network clogging continue to prevail in the high iPhone density areas like New York and San Francisco. In order to address this problem, Apple is reported to have modified its review policies to approve only those video streaming apps that come with adaptive bitrates.
Adaptive bitrate is fast becoming an industry standard whereby developers render the videos at bitrates conducive to the users' network connection. (more…)

“Imagine that Netflix offers its subscribers the ability to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on their iPhone . The selection availability to instantly watch includes some new releases, lots of classics and TV episodes. There are no advertisements or trailers, and movies start in as little as 30 seconds. You can fast-forward, rewind, and pause or watch again. The movies & TV episodes you instantly watch are included in your Netflix membership (more…)

Grooveshark is a free web based music streaming service that allows users to upload, share and stream tracks from a massive catalog of songs. The new iPhone app will allow their Premium/VIP members of the service use their
to search for music from the huge database. Additionally, users may also organize tracks into playlists, mark tracks as favorite and listen to songs offline. The web based alternative available on the company's website runs (more…)

“The key for us is Sling Media was willing to work with us to revise the app to make it more bandwidth sensitive, “Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said in a statement. “They made important changes to more efficiently use 3G network bandwidth and conserve wireless spectrum so that we were able to support the app on our 3G mobile broadband network.”
However, Sling Media claims that it didn’t work with AT&T (more…)

. Lala has a catalog of over 8 million songs and the service lets its users stream any song for free the first time. Thereafter users need to purchase the song for 10 cents to be able to stream them multiple times. Lala's unique selling proposition is that the entire music library is in the cloud, making hardware memory redundant.
The acquisition has the potential to change the way iTunes works. We could be moving towards a scenario where the (more…)