On Wednesday we reported on a story that suggested Verizon may be planning to challenge Netflix by launching its own video streaming service. Now, it appears the communications giant is secretly working with RedBox, the popular $1.00 video rental kiosk company, on a streaming service that could launch next year. According to TechCrunch, the plan is currently called “Project Zoetrope” and it will allow users to subscribe, download and stream movies and television shows across a variety of platfor...

Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and 20th Century Fox’s UltraViolet service, which will allow consumers to stream purchased movies to internet connected devices, will make its debut this week. The movie studios hope UltraViolet will attract consumers back to purchasing movies instead of simply renting them. Here’s how it will work: when you purchase a DVD or Blu-ray disc with an UltraViolet label, you will have the option to also stream the movie to portable devices such as smartphones and tablets, or...

Sony Pictures is working on a deal to acquire the rights to Steve Jobs’s biography for a feature film, BGR sister site Deadline reported on Friday. The highly anticipated authorized biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacsson is due for release on October 24th, and Sony Pictures is reportedly making a substantial offer for the motion picture rights. ”I’m hearing the deal is $1 million against $3 million and that Mark Gordon will be the producer,” Mike Fleming wrote on Deadline. Sony Picture...

A new report from research firm IHS suggests that Apple’s iTunes share of “consumer spending for movie electronic sell-through (EST) and Internet video on demand (iVOD)” grew during the first half of 2011, the first time since 2009, despite an increase in competition from Walmart and Amazon. iTunes had a 65.8% market share during the first half of this year, up from 64.9% during the first half of 2010. It also had the largest increase in revenue growth among its competitors. “Much of i...

German gadget news site BestBoyZ has gotten its hands on one of LG’s upcoming mid-range handsets, the E730 Optimus Sol. Originally codenamed “Victor,” the device is equipped with a 3.8-inch AMOLED display and a 1GHz processor. The Optimus Sol runs Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) and is loaded with LG’s custom Optimus user interface on top. It is unclear when the Optimus Sol will hit the market but rumor has it Vodafone will offer the device in black and silver when it finally launches. Hit...

Apple issued an update to its Apple TV product on Monday that will allow users to stream purchased high-definition TV shows directly from iTunes. Specifically, Apple says the update will enable:iTunes TV Shows: Purchase your favorite TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, and watch the shows you already own, commercial-free in HD.Vimeo: Browse and play videos from Vimeo, access your video inbox, and mark videos you want to watch later.When Apple first launched the Apple TV, it only allowed users to rent mov...

Netflix announced two new unlimited DVD plans on Tuesday, including a $7.99 option for one DVD at a time and an $11.99 option that allows users to rent two DVDs at a time. The company also said that it will discontinue its current $9.99 monthly option that provides access to unlimited DVD rentals and unlimited instant streaming each month. Instead, the movie rental service will charge users $7.99 a month for unlimited streaming and a minimum of $7.99 per month for unlimited DVDs (with one rented out at a time...

AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon have reached an agreement with music and movie publishers that will help enforce copyright infringement while giving the ISPs a chance to level with their customers. According to Ars Technica, copyright owners will continue to scour the dark corners of the net looking for anyone downloading and illegally sharing their content. If an IP is found to be downloading or sharing illegal content — likely via P2P networks — the music and movie compani...

The production studio behind the movie Hurt Locker, Voltage Pictures, is attempting to go after a record 24,583 illegal BitTorrent users. The studio has already filed lawsuits against 5,000 BitTorrent users who illegally downloaded Hurt Locker and, in an effort to make up losses due to piracy, it’s now going after more with the help of law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver. According to TorrentFreak, the lion’s share of subscribers — provided on a list to the U.S. District Court of Columbia — are ...

The wait is over — Netflix finally announced on Thursday that its Android application is now available in the Android Market. But there’s a catch: it’s only supported on “select phones that have the requisite playback support.” If your device isn’t on Netflix’s approved list just yet, don’t fret, as the firm says it will add to its supported devices list over time. The video streaming service is already available on Windows Phone and iOS, so why did it take so long ...

Rovio, the developer behind the wildly successful Angry Birds franchise, announced on Monday that its forthcoming Android title Angry Birds Rio for Android will launch exclusively in the Amazon Appstore. Amazon announced in January that its app store, which will rival Google’s own Android Market on the Android platform, was open for developer submissions. The exclusive deal with Rovio marks Amazon’s first major coup in the space, as the title is expected to be a wildly popular game for Android. ...

For this week’s installation of Throwback Thursday, we’re going to journey back to the year 1987. A time when the Iran-Contra Affair was front page news, the term “Black Monday” was coined, and Double Dragon was the most popular game in your local arcade. Developed by Technos Japan, Double Dragon tells the tale of two brothers, Hammer and Spike, who are trying to navigate through gang-turf dominated by the Black Warriors (anyone else noticing some racial undertones twenty years post fa...

Released in September of 1996, the Nokia 8110 was a unique member of the Finnish company’s high-end 8000-series line of phones. The device’s curved shape and manual-sliding keyboard cover earned the device the nickname of “banana phone.” The device operated on the 900MHz GSM frequency, had a monochromatic, dot-matrix display, and could store a whopping 125 contacts in its on-board address book. As the press release boasts:The revolutionary curved design fits the natural shape of your f...

I attended the world premiere of The Social Network yesterday evening to kick off the New York Film Festival, and while I had reservations about the movie, I was still admittedly excited. After the movie finished, I heard one of the loudest applauses I have heard in a while. The writing was impeccably sharp, hilariously funny at times, and the movie was probably the best I have seen all year. Yes, there was a scene where Mark Zuckerberg got his business cards that said, “I’m CEO, Bitch!”, a...