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Sprint and Skiff have announced today that they will be introducing the new Skiff e-reader at the CES event later this week, one that will be extremely fast and will feature a large resolution screen.

“We think it’s the speediest reader yet,” says Gil Fuchsberg, president of Skiff. "We've got some things that we can do that you’ve never been able to do on e-ink screens before."

Partner Sprint will provide the 3G wireless service for the device, and will even make the Skiff Reader available in Sprint retail stores and online, the first carrier to do so.

Skiff will also offer a store selling newspapers, magazines and e-books that should work with most other e-readers and smartphone apps. "We think there'll be a market for dedicated readers alongside applications on your phone or tablet PCs," Fuchsberg added, via the NYT.

The display is black and white, but Fuchsberg says a firmware update will bring color very soon. "We're working very aggressively on color, and we’ll bring color to this device as quickly as we can," he added.

Scripps Networks Interactive has pulled its popular Food Network and HGTV channels from Cablevision, after the two companies could not agree to carriage fees.

Cablevision is a smaller cable company, with only 3.1 million subscribers in New York and New Jersey, but the move mirrors that of the recent, larger fight between Time Warner and Fox (News Corp.)

Scripps says the cable provider is not properly compensating it for the channels, and has an active media campaign trying to get consumers to complain about the channels being removed.

"The distribution rates Cablevision pays for Food and HGTV are among the lowest in the industry," added Scripps CEO Kenneth Lowe.

"We are sorry that Scripps' current financial difficulties are making it impossible for them to continue our relationship on terms that are reasonable for Cablevision and our customers," responded Cablevision. "We wish Scripps well and have no expectation of carrying their programming again, given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers."

Electronista is reporting today that Syabas, the company behind the Popcorn Hour media hub, will be showing off the newly dubbed Popbox at the upcoming CES event, a media hub that should surpass the Popcorn Hour in every way thanks to a newly finished user interface overhaul.

The new interface includes "infopops" which show off the weather, Twitter feeds, and other data. The interface also includes a cover-flow-esque visual thumbnails selection for videos, music and other data, as well as universal search.

More notably, the interface can handle Flash, Java and QT meaning Netflix is now available. Also available is Hulu, CBS and ABC content, which can now include the in-video ads required for playback. Facebook, Twitter, Shoutcast MP3, Revision3 and other Popcorn Hour content will rollover to the new box.

For video, full 1080p at 100Mbps is now supported, along with the standard MPEG formats, H.264, VC-1, WMV, MKV, XviD and other containers. The player can also support most subtitle files, including Microsoft's proprietary one. For streaming, the Popbox can recognize iTunes via Bonjour, and DLNA and UPnP sources.

The "movie social-networking" company Flixster has announced today the purchase of popular movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, expanding its overall presence in the industry.

Rotten Tomatoes was formerly owned by gaming outfit IGN, and IGN will get a minority stake in Flixster as part of the new deal. Other financial details were not released.

The WSJ says the combined entities have 30 million monthly visitors per month combined, and Flixster had already integrated RT ratings into its mobile device apps. Overall, both sites now have a database of 250,000 movies and DVDs, 2.3 billion user reviews, 550,000 critic reviews and tens of thousands of trailers and other videos.

"Rotten Tomatoes has built a fantastically well-known brand that moviegoers trust when making their decisions. Combined with Flixster's social networking and word-of-mouth, we're creating the leading movie destination on the Internet," added Flixster President and Chief Operating Officer Steve Polsky.

LG today has posted on their Korean-language site that it will be introducing at least two new Blu-ray players at the upcoming CES event, each of which will "significantly expand" the Internet-enabled capabilities of current BD players.

The company will expand on the NetCast Entertainment Access used on current models, which allows for CinemaNow, Netflix, Pandora and YouTube playback.

LG teases that users can download movies and music and then create digital libraries that are searchable by metadata. Other Internet updates will include weather forecasts and updates, and DLNA connectivity.

CES begins on Thursday.

Popular HDTV maker Vizio has announced that it will begin integrating Wireless HD technology into its HDTVs, using SiBEAM 60GHz chipsets.

The company can begin doing so after it completes its application to join the WirelessHD Association, which seems more like a formality than anything.

Vizio and SiBEAM will introduce their new XVT Pro TV lineup of LED-backlit machines at the upcoming CES event.

SiBEAM currently provides WirelessHD to Best Buy, Panasonic, Monster, Sony, and LG, says Electronista, and the technology allows for streaming of lossless 1080p at 4Gbps without interfering with any other wireless products. The tech is also known to break through any physical barriers such as walls or furniture.

The U.S. launch of Spotify was delayed in November after it was learned that the record labels wanted users to pay for the normally free ad-supported service, while Spotify wants it to remain free.

TechCrunch is reporting today that Spotify in the U.S. will indeed be free for users, but that it will be "limited" to a "very" few number of people.

More notably, TC says the company has been in talks with Google to launch the service built-in with Android 2.1, the firmware run by the upcoming Nexus One smartphone. The Nexus One is expected to launch tomorrow at a Google press conference. Google is said to have wanted Spotify integration so badly that it is willing to cover the $36-a-year fee the record labels want from each user.

We shall see tomorrow.

According to VidZone head of production Ben Creasey, the application has now become the largest music video streaming app in the world.

"VidZone is official the biggest dedicated music video streaming application in the world," says Creasey.

He adds that the application has been downloaded "over" two million times and 200 million videos have been streamed since launch. "I think the correct response is 'wow!'" Creasey concluded.

VidZone is free to European PS3 owners, and has about 15,000 music videos available. VidZone launched in June.

Sony accidentally made the still-in-theaters film Armored available via the PlayStation Store earlier this week, offering the movie as a free digital download for about five hours.

All users had to do was head over to the PS Store, search for "Armored" and download the movie, for free, for the PS3 and the PSP.

For those that missed it, the film has resurfaced as Armored 2009 DVDSCR READNFO XviD-PrisM on torrent and warez sites, and the entire situation is a pretty large mistake to be made by the corporation. Perhaps a marketing stunt?

In the past week, Verizon Wireless has been pushing a Bing search engine application onto BlackBerry phones, without the owners consent.

Microsoft and Verizon signed a $500 million USD pact last year, in which the wireless carrier agreed to make Bing the default search engine for the browser in most of its phones. BlackBerry owners had always had the chance to select their own default search engine, however.

Many BlackBerry users now have a Bing icon on their phones, which is a link to install the app, although it cannot be deleted, only hidden. Worst of all, it was added without consent of the user.

Verizon has posted information on how to hide the icon after many complained but added: "We think Verizon Wireless BlackBerry users will love Bing, but we are passionate about customer choice."

BGR has revealed some new specs for the Android-based Motorola Devour, Verizon's third known device running the Google operating system.

Formerly dubbed "Calgary," the Devour will likely launch in two colorways, black and silver, with the silver casing a new development.

As for the operating system, the new leak seems to confirm that the Devour will run Android 2.1, so far only confirmed for the Nexus One, and will have MOTOBLUR as well, Motorola's Android user interface which connects social networking, emails and RSS feeds.

The phone will only work on Verizon, having support for Verizon's own EV-DO mobile broadband network. Wi-fi and Bluetooth are standard as well. The device will include a slider QWERTY keypad, optical trackpad, a 3.2MP camera, 3.5 mm headset jack, a GPS receiver, and a microSD memory card slot.

China has arrested over almost 5400 people in 2009 in its latest Internet pornography crackdown, calling the new tougher policy a key piece of China's "state security."

In the last month, the Chinese government began offering up to 10,000 yuan (about $1500 USD) to anyone who reported sites featuring porn, and 9000 sites were taken down alongside the arrest of 5394 citizens.

For 2010, China says it will "strengthen punishment for Internet operators that violate the laws and regulations...severely punish operations that have serious problems with harmful information".

"Purifying the Internet environment and cracking down on Internet crimes is related to long-term state security," added the ministry, via the AFP.

While the number arrested may seem large, it is important to note that China has 338 million Internet users, and thousands of porn sites and operators remain active today.

Rock star Bono, of the group U2 made some interesting quotes today, in regards to illegal file sharing and the music and movie industries.

"The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files," says Bono, adding that in just a few years, bandwidth will be so abundant, and connections so fast that entire movies can be downloaded in under a minute, regardless of size.

"A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators -- in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can't live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us," he added.

Bono does believe that Internet content can be tracked, and cited the US' effort to stop child pornography as well as China's to suppress online gaming and pornography.

"Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly four percent of gross domestic product," Bono concluded.

Redbox has announced that they have set a new one-day rental record, seeing 2 million DVDs rented from their kiosks on New Year's Eve.

The previous record was only 170,000 rentals, and the company adds the most popular titles were District 9 and Paranormal Activity.

"With many Americans celebrating New Year's Eve at home and many more resolving to save money in 2010, Redbox proved a great way to do both," added senior VP of marketing and customer experience Gary Cohen, via VB.

Redbox has over 22,000 kiosk nationwide and says that they saw 350 million rentals total in 2009.

Apple has won their appeal in a class-action lawsuit that was aiming to hold the company responsible for possible hearing loss caused by iPods.

The appeals court said that the plaintiffs failed to show that iPod use posed "unreasonable risk of noise-induced hearing loss."

Apple has sold over 220 million iPods since 2001, and each unit comes with a warning telling users to listen to their music and movies at "safe" volume levels.

"The plaintiffs do not allege the iPods failed to do anything they were designed to do nor do they allege that they, or any others, have suffered or are substantially certain to suffer inevitable hearing loss or other injury from iPod use," Senior Judge David Thompson added. "At most, the plaintiffs plead a potential risk of hearing loss not to themselves, but to other unidentified iPod users," he concluded.