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A newly launched site called TVGorge is promoting what millions of international citizens have wanted for years from streaming site Hulu; free access to tons of TV shows, legally.

The site uses "indexing techniques" to gather content from tons of legal TV streaming sites around the world. It claims TV.com, Hulu, TVGuide and TVDuck as "partners." The site does not store video files on its own servers and simply uses links or embeds from other sites.

There are currently 120 TV shows available, with full seasons available for shows such as Californication, 24 and 30 Rock, among many others.

Although the site claims legality, it will be interesting to see how long until some content holder puts an end to the site, or at least the international part.

Twentieth Century Fox has filed six new lawsuits this week, all against alleged sellers of a workprint version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was leaked online one month before the film's theatrical release.

The DVDs containing the pirated film were being sold on iOffer.com, Craigslist.org and Sell.com before the movie's release date.

A few of the lawsuits are for different movies, including "Marley & Me," "Avatar" and "Bride Wars." Fox employees purchased the discs from these sellers over the course of the last year.

Fox says it is seeking up to $150,000 per infringement.

"This kind of conduct not only violates the law, it’s just plain wrong," Fox added. "We filed these lawsuits today to protect our creative professionals and the intellectual property they spend years developing."

Almost a year later, the FBI and Fox have still been unable to track down the earliest leak of the workprint copy.

Microsoft has announced today that they will be discontinuing Xbox Live service for the original Xbox console starting in April. The move will effectively kill all online play for the orphaned console, as well as for Xbox games that can be played on the Xbox 360.

"This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but after careful consideration, it is clear this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox Live community," says XBL general manager Marc Whitten.

Whitten does admit that some games still have significant amounts of players, such as Halo 2, but all things must come to an end. Says the GM: "There’s no greater example of the power of the Xbox Live community than the Halo franchise. Halo 2 has had an amazing run on Live, with a dedicated community more than five years after launch and well into the next generation of consoles. It has fundamentally changed the way we play videogames. And while it’s difficult to see that run come to an end, the Halo franchise continues to act as the benchmark for multiplayer gaming in this generation, with Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and soon Halo: Reach on Xbox 360."

Voddler, an internet-based on demand video service, has just received 2.6 million euros in venture capital. Based out of Sweden, Voddler offers video streams for a variety of TV and movie titles.

Voddler has been in business since 2005. Currently their service is in beta and boasts 400,000 users in Sweden who had watched 1 million titles as of January.

They plan to expand into Norway in the first quarter of this year, followed by launches in Denmark and Finland.

Voddler is similar to Spotify, a streaming music service also based out of Sweden. Titles can be viewed for free, paid for by advertising.

In the future Voddler will also begin offering a premium service where users can pay directly to avoid the ads.

Sometimes seems like Netflix and Hulu are the only serious streaming video services because they get so much press. But competition from companies like Voddler will be essential for the market to grow, particularly outside the US.

Apple is still working with Verizon on an iPad model that will support Verizon's 3G service says Fox News, citing a source within Verizon.

Earlier this week Fox News reported that AT&T had outbid Verizon and therefore will be the carrier of choice at launch in March. AT&T had not ironed out a deal until six days before the iPad launch event on January 27th, says the report.

Following Fox's note, a few Wall Street firms predicted that a Verizon deal would be signed by the end of 2010. Some say Apple will announce a new iPhone and an iPad, both with Verizon support at June's WWDC event.

Arstechnica is reporting today that RealVideo continues its death spiral, this time with C-SPAN getting rid of the streaming video format in favor of Flash and Windows Media.

Says the C-SPAN site: "Due to lack of demand for the RealVideo format, we will be retiring our links to C-SPAN live video streams in the RealVideo format effective March 1, 2010."

The Ars reporter says the codec lives on in a few Government committees, such as the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works but the FCC finally upgraded last year to Flash, after previously broadcasting all their meetings on a server that could handle only up to 200 users and produced 240x240 resolution video.

Amazon has announced their acquisition of the touchscreen company Touchco, a move that will lead to the next Kindle e-reader being a touchscreen device.

The NY Times says Touchco's "interpolating force-sensitive resistance technology allows for flexible, transparent, pressure-sensitive touch-screens that could cost as little as $10 a square foot."

By comparison, the iPad's touchscreen is more expensive and "cannot detect the unlimited amount of simultaneous touch points that Touchco's technology allows."

Touchco's screens can distinguish between the different pressures produced by a human finger or by a pen stylus.

Today's Video Daily comes from Google, which has announced that its upcoming Chrome OS will be used for tablets as well, with some of the concept pictures and a video posted on their blog.

What will make this special compared to the recently unveiled iPad? Looks like we will have to wait and see for the most part.

The Hollywood studios have lost a landmark case against the ISP iiNet today after an eight-week trial.

The case would have impacted how Australian ISPs would have had to react to potential pirates, but the judge ruled that iiNet was not responsible for the downloading habits of any of its subscribers.

Justice Cowdroy said all the evidence showed that iiNet was simply providing Internet service for its customers, not facilitating piracy. He did conclude, however, that iiNet had knowledge of infringements occurring and did not anything to stop them, which was fine as the ISP is simply "a legitimate communication facility," not "intended nor designed to infringe copyright."

"iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement ... the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another," Justice Cowdroy added.

MPEG LA, the company behind the H.264 video-encoding codec, has decided to extended the royalty-free period of the tech until December 31st, 2015, allowing sites to stream using the technology for free.

The current licensing period was set to finish at the end of 2010.

The extension may be a way to "encourage" sites to use H.264 instead of free rival Ogg Theora, which was recently selected by Wikipedia for video playback. H.264 is currently used by the king of web video, however, YouTube.

Lesser rival On2 creates a codec called VP8, and Google recently announced their acquisition of On2, sparking speculation that VP8 would be the new codec of choice for YouTube.

A DVD-Screener copy of the highest-grossing film of all-time, Avatar, has hit P2P and torrents today, coming just a few days after Academy members received the screener from Fox.

Until today, telesync versions had been available, and total downloads were estimated at over 2 million just from torrent downloads. The first copy available was Avatar DVDScr xvid - IMAGiNE.

The new screener will likely see many times that amount of downloads, but Fox should have little to worry about as Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all-time and will undoubtedly be the best selling DVD in years and the biggest Blu-ray release of all-time by a long shot.

According to the The Symbian Foundation, the world's most popular mobile operating system, Symbian, is going open-source.

Individual developers as well as organizations can now modify the source code "for any purpose."

The Foundation says over 330 million smartphones have shipped worldwide running Symbian and the new move to open-source should attract a plethora of new developers to work on the platform, thus speeding up improvements.

"This is the largest open source migration effort ever," says Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation, via the BBC. "It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform."

Nokia purchased the software in 2008 and created the Foundation to oversee the transition to open-source. Members of the Foundation include Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

Apple has released iPhone OS update 3.1.3, and along with the bug fixes and security patches comes the inevitable breaking of jailbroken devices.

Creators of jailbreaking tools such as Redsn0w, Blackra1n, and PwnageTool have warned jailbroken iPhone/Touch users to not update to the latest firmware just yet. In fact, Redsn0w was updated just yesterday to work with OS update 3.1.2.

For now, if you want to keep your device jailbroken, do not update to 3.1.3, and be careful with the unpatched security exploits.

Twitter director of Trust and Safety Del Harvey has posted today that it will be forcing a number of users to change their passwords this week after it was discovered that hackers had used torrent sites to steal access to user's data.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to monitor our user base for odd activity, we noticed a sudden surge in followers for a couple of accounts in the last five days. Given the circumstances surrounding this we felt it was best to push out a password reset to accounts that were following these suspicious users," said Harvey.

It is unclear how many users are affected.

The details were stolen from third-party torrent sites that require logins. Because many users use the same information for multiple sites, the hackers used the torrent site logins for Twitter as well.

"As a general rule, if you signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there," adds Harvey. "The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or variant) on multiple sites. We strongly suggest that you use different passwords for each service you sign up for."

Fox News is reporting that Verizon and AT&T fought over having their 3G service available to future iPad owners and that AT&T won the rights by outbidding the competition.

iPad 3G costs $30 USD monthly for unlimited, or $15 for 250MB data plans, a price about half the cost of what 3G service would normally cost from AT&T for a netbook or modem owner.

Verizon had no comment on the report, and AT&T did not either except to say it's happy to be the "main carrier partner" for the iPad.