TechCrunch TV is now really TechCrunch TV. When TCTV launched last year, the focus was on viewing our videos on the computer. Not on TV. Ok, we called it “TechCrunch TV” because it sounded a lot better than “TechCrunch Video”. But today, we are launching on the AOL HD platform and you can find us on your connected TV set.

Our videos are live on Roku, Boxee, Divx and Yahoo Connected TV platforms. Together, these platforms reach over 12 million devices. And that number is growing. A new report by Strategy Analytics says 42 million homes in the US and Europe are now using Connected TV devices. Don’t be surprised if more platforms get added to AOL HD as well. (AOL, the owner of TechCrunch, didn’t want me to say anything about that. Oh well.)

You can find these shows on the channel:

• Founder Stories: Chris Dixon takes and gives advice to entrepreneurs.
• Fly or Die: John Biggs and Erick Schonfeld give a “fly” or “die” verdict to new products.
• Keen On: Andrew Keen interviews leading thinkers and writers about technology issues.

We are working to get other shows like TC Cribs on the channel, but AOL HD plays only HD content and Cribs is shot in SD. We’ll be changing that soon.

Both on-stage and backstage videos from our Disrupt conferences are available, so you can watch those events from your living room.

The TechCrunch videos appear under AOL HD’s Technology channel, along with other videos from Engadget and Translogic. Robert DelaCruz, General Manager for AOL HD, says “I’m very pleased to include TechCrunch to the channel lineup. TechCrunch further strengthens AOL HD’s technology offering with the latest in technology, from breaking news to startups to gadgets.”

If you want to learn more or get installation instructions, head over to hd.aol.com. Otherwise, lean back and start watching us on your TV. Of course, you can continue to watch on your computer, mobile phone or tablet as well. Those hackers out there who were already using Airplay, or Apple TV, or other means to view our content on TV, will now be joined by a much larger group who can see TechCrunch TV on TV.

CineXPlayer, a free app for the iPad that plays back DivX video, was just released today and should be down within the week. Why? Well, generally anything that isn’t iTunes compatible is frowned upon, leading to many “homebrew” DivX implementations in the Cydia store but no real ones.

You can download the app right here and I’m wondering how this sneaked past the censors, especially since it duplicates features already found on the iPad and, in short, is really only for pirates.

Oh well, good luck, CineXPlayer. Grab it quick and enjoy some DivX.

via MacLife

Sonic Solutions and DivX, both listed on Nasdaq, this morning announced that they are to become one. Under the terms of the agreement, Sonic would acquire all the outstanding shares of DivX and merge DivX operations into those of Sonic.

DivX stockholders would receive a combination of cash and stock equal to $3.75 in cash and 0.514 shares of Sonic common stock for each share of DivX they hold. The offer was worth $9.83 a share at Tuesday’s closing price, or around $323 million in total.

The price is a 41% premium to Tuesday’s closing price for DivX shares.

Sonic says the purchase could potentially double fiscal year 2012 earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis. Following completion of the merger, DivX stockholders will own approximately 35% of the combined company’s capital stock.

The acquisition is expected to close in September 2010.

Here’s how Sonic pitches the buy to shareholders and the press:

For more than 20 years, Sonic has been the leader in developing technologies for the preparation and delivery of entertainment content in popular formats — CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc and most recently Internet delivery of video.

The acquisition of DivX is expected to advance Sonic’s mission to deliver technology that makes it easy and convenient for retailers, online services, Hollywood studios, and manufacturers of CE and mobile devices to distribute premium digital video content over the Internet. DivX is expected to enable Sonic to deepen and broaden the technology it offers for Internet-based video delivery and expand its relationships with leading retailers and consumer electronics manufacturers.

DivX technology is said to reside on over 300 million devices, including over 8,500 models of digital televisions, DVD and Blu-ray Disc players, and over 80 different mobile handsets. The DivX web properties get visited by more than 12 million unique users on a monthly basis, combined, according to the release.

The current Sonic management team will lead the combined company, augmented with key managers and executives from DivX. Kevin Hell, DivX’s CEO, Dan Halvorson, DivX’s CFO and David Richter, DivX’s executive vice president, business & legal affairs and general counsel, will be leaving the combined company after the transaction is closed.

The “anybody but iPod” crowd has another portable media player to choose from, and it’s from Samsung. It’s called the R1, and it’s your standard issue touchscreen PMP. It does play Divx-encoded video, which should be a benefit to those of you who haven’t moved onto Blu-ray rips, or who enjoy watching standard-def rips of TV shows on the subway.

It’s small, yeah, with its screen coming in at 2.6-inches, and being only 8.9mm (0.89 cm). You know Samsung worked damn hard to get that under 9.0mm.

There’s not much else here: it’s a PMP, for Pete’s sake. These things have been the same for four years now.

The R1 will come in 8GB an 16GB flavors when it comes out this fall. A specific release date? Nowhere to be found. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

JVC Japan announced the XV-BP1 today [JP], a new Blu-ray player that comes with two interesting features and a fair price. The player supports DivX/MPEG-4/MKV/AVCHD files and sports a USB port at the front so you can plug in a USB stick with your DivX-movies (you know, the ones you downloaded legally earlier) into the device and directly start watching.

The player also supports BD-Live, Bonus View and delivers video in 1080/60p or 24p quality (DVD upscaling in 1080/60p). Needless to say, it not only features a USB port but also an HDMI interface.

The XV-BP1 will hit Japanese stores in late July (JVC is yet to announce international distribution plans) and will cost $440.

Well, sometimes utilizing a sneakernet is easier than setting up a complicated network, running cables, finding compatible equipment that’s loaded with the right codec just so you can watch a pirated movie. Now, just load the movie on an SD card and the TV will play it back; as long as it’s encoded in DivX.

More layoffs today at DivX, the publicly traded video codec supplier that recently sued Yahoo over canceling a contract that makes up as much as 20 percent of its revenue. According to a tip that came into our Layoff Tracker, 21 people were let go. I just confirmed that until-now unannounced number with DivX investor relations. It represents just under 10 percent of the workforce in San Diego, where DivX is based (although there were some cuts globally as well).

Its stock is trading under $5, about a third of where it was a year ago.

This follows the resignation of its CTO Markus Moenig earlier this month. And some readers may remember the drama surrounding DivX’s shutdown of its video site Stage6 back in February.

Keep those layoff tips coming.

How long will it be before we’re no longer forced to lug around both a camera phone and a full-fledged standalone camera, “just in case” something truly photo-worthy goes down? According to LG, not too long. At a round table event in London last week, the company’s head of marketing stated that he sees no reason why camera phones couldn’t replace point and shoot cameras sometime in the foreseeable future.

At the same event, Andy Glasson of DivX mentioned that the company is working for H.264 encoding/decoding solutions for mobile handsets, which could lead to HD video recording at some point in the future.

With the Innov8, Pixon, KC780, and KC910 all set to offer 8 megapixel shots, things seem to be covered on the resolution front. Until we start seeing photo samples to prove that they offer more than the blurry blue messes we’ve come to expect of camera phone shots, I won’t start packing up my pocket shooter.

[Via Pocket-Lint]

DivX is making its way into more and more CE devices. Pioneer’s latest Blu-ray players couldn’t withstand the DivX invasion and the BDP-LX71, BDP-LX08 and BDP-51FD all earned the certification that states the unit can playback high-quality DivX material. These players are already shipping worldwide, so just because yours doesn’t carry the logo on the front bezel doesn’t mean that the player isn’t certified. 

PR

DivX will make its way into more Blu-ray players thanks to the certification of the popular Broadcom BCM7440 chip. This single chip will facilitate DivX playback on a disc or stored on a flash drive. By taking the decoding off the software suite, and placing the task on the chip, it will allow for a significant performance upgrade and smoother playback. Curious to know if your next Blu-ray player has the chip? Look for the DivX Certified logo on the front bezel. 

So far, I see promise in the plug-ins feature, which allows developers to create their own stuff – I installed a Digg.com thing, an HD movie preview function, and a Google Maps application. Streaming HD content over my 802.11G wireless connection has been so-so. If the files are already on my PC, everything works great. Files that need to be downloaded and streamed on the fly tend to stutter from time to time.

All in all the device looks pretty good, though. I’ll run it through some more tests over the next week or so and report back.

DLink’s DSM-330 is now available for $299. It connects to your home networks via Wi-Fi or Ethernet and can play back high definition DivX content on your TV using DivX Connected functionality, which basically streams DivX, Xvid, WMV, DV, MPEG-1, and MJPEG video content (various audio formats too) from your computer and also harnesses your CPU’s horsepower to make all the pretty menus.

There’s HDMI output along with component, composite, S-Video, and Scart, plus RCA, S/PDIF, and Optical audio outputs. D-Link is selling the DSM-330 for $299, but you can find it for cheaper elsewhere – Amazon.com has it for $199 after rebate, for instance.

More photos and full press release after the jump…

D-LINK NOW SHIPPING FIRST DIVX CONNECTED HIGH-DEFINITION MEDIA PLAYER IN U.S.

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif., July 9, 2008 — D-Link, the end-to-end networking solutions provider for consumer and business, and DivX, Inc. (NASDAQ: DIVX), a digital media company, today announced the availability of the first DivX Connected™ device in the U.S., with distribution in Canadian markets soon to follow. The D-Link® MediaLounge® DSM-330 enables the seamless streaming of music, photos, Internet services, and high definition video from PCs to the television.

"As more and more people embrace the DivX platform, we recognize the growing demand for a media player that supports all the capabilities that the DivX interface has to offer," said Chris Wong, Director of Product Management, D-Link Systems, Inc. "There is increasing market demand for solutions that bridge the gap between the PC and television and we are proud to be the first to work with DivX in bringing Connected to North America."

"The DivX Connected platform enables an entirely new way to experience digital media and represents our continued mission to improve the way in which consumers engage their digital entertainment," said Patrice Lagrange, Senior Vice President, Products, DivX, Inc. "Connected offers a vibrant solution to the expansive gap between PC and living room entertainment, and DivX is pleased to work with D-Link in bringing this revolutionary platform to the U.S."

DivX Connected is a powerful, open media platform that allows consumers to experience and control PC-based digital media on their television using a remote control and is capable of being embedded within many consumer electronics devices, including digital televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray DVD players, and more. The platform’s easy-to-use SDKs allow users to customize the look and feel of their media experience and even create plug-ins to a world of internet services such as Google Maps, Last.fm, Facebook and many more.

Key Features of the DSM-330:

• Fast, intuitive remote-controlled TV interface
• Highly responsive, remote-control lets you access trick modes: skip forward 30 seconds, skip back 10 seconds and virtual chapter points
• Connects to television using HDMI (cable included), component (cable included), composite, S-Video or SCART
• Connects to home network via 802.11g Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable
• Supported Video Formats include DivX (including DivX VOD files), Xvid and WMV9 (transcoded on PC)
• Supported Image Formats include JPEG, JPEG 2000 and BMP (non-compressed)
• Supported Audio Formats include MP3, WMA (transcoded on PC), M3U, M3U8 and PLS
• WEP, WPA and WPA2 Wireless Security Supported

For more information on DivX Connected, see www.divx.com/connected. For more information on the D-Link DSM-330, see www.dlink.com/DSM-330.

Price and Availability

The D-Link DSM-330 is available through D-Link’s network of retail outlets, value-added resellers, solution providers and distributors, or at the company’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com, for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $299.99.

Anyway, whereas DIVX relied on special DVD players that could play DIVX discs (and also regular DVDs), a new disposable DVD coming from a German company called DVD-D will supposedly work in any DVD player, will cost €3.99 ($6.44 US) and will expire in 48 hours.

According to the Register…

DVD-D Germany Ltd’s ‘Einmal’ (German for ‘once’) – discs incorporate a self-destruct chemical coating to render them unreadable after a pre-set time. The process begins as soon as the discs are removed from vacuum-sealed packaging. After 48 hours (or longer, depending on the price) the DVD gives a ‘No disc’ error when put into a DVD player or PC. There appears to be no DRM (digital rights management), so you couldcopy the disks, if you’re quick enough.

The DVD-D discs are available in Germany currently and may or may not make it stateside. I’m guessing probably not, with all the On-Demand and Apple TV stuff.

Would any of you red-blooded Americans do this? Let’s assume that they’d cost $4 apiece here, not $6.44. Let’s just forget the whole weak dollar thing never happened.

According to a release from LiveUniverse, the company offered to acquire Stage6 prior to the site being shut by DivX 25 February. The offer was $11 million in cash & carriage plus an equity Stake in Stage6 and Promotion of DivX Software. LiveUniverse then claims that the DivX Board “refused to engage in any direct dialogue with LiveUniverse for over 5 days, and during this time, DivX shuts down Stage6.”

Despite the site being shut for nearly 2 weeks, LiveUniverse still wants to buy it and is appealing to DivX shareholders to pressure the company into selling. DivX shareholders can visit www.livevideo.com/SaveStage6” to take initiative and proactively push the Board to do the right thing for shareholders.”

LiveUniverse is claiming that “despite daily outbound calls and emails, LiveUniverse was and is unable to reach any of the DivX executives including General Counsel David Richter who LiveUniverse was originally referred to for the purposes of buying Stage6.” The go on to say that “Directors of public companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to try to get the best deal and represent their interests, first and foremost” and “DivX Board’s decision to destroy website and its community when there was and is a firm superior offer on table from LiveUniverse raises questions of whether proper sales process was followed.”

The one part missing from LiveUniverse’s statement is why? why do they want to buy Stage6? Sure, it was a great site with a ton of traffic, but it was only great because it offered a BitTorrent style smorgasbord of pirated content without the need to download it. Without the pirated movies, the traffic on Stage6 means nothing. Either LiveUniverse knows something we don’t about the site, or they’re taking a big risk.

If and when the **AA have Usenet shut down after the piece appears, feel free to blame Biggs. He’s making me write it.

I occasionally mention Usenet when talking about piracy here, but I’ve never really explained what it is or what it does. I’m still not going to explain what it is, technically, (that’s what Wikipedia’s for), but I will put it in layman’s terms. Think of Usenet as a big, unregulated, uncontrollable message board in the sky. The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy even logged onto Usenet when he needed to know the star of Radioactive Man!

The key difference with Usenet is that users can attach files to their messages. That’s the gist of it, at least. And since you can attach a file to a message you can, conceivably, attach many files to many messages. That’s what people do. You’ll find these file-laden posts on something called binary groups. And that’s where the piracy aspect comes into play. Literally thousands of groups devoted to literally thousands of categories, each one filled with all sorts of pirated content. Entire albums, entire movies, entire video games—getting 0day DreamCast games back in the day was top-notch—et cetera. Basically, Usenet rules and is what all the cool kids use. Hopefully you’ll be able to use it, too, after this.

Before you can downloads gigs upon gigs of premium content, you’ll need two things to access Usenet: access to a Usenet server and a newsreader. Like I said, Usenet can be thought of as a giant message board, but one that you need permission to access. Some ISPs give you access to a Usenet server as part of your monthly Internet bill. TimeWarner, my current ISP, has a server as did my previous ISP, Cablevision/OptimumOnline. My old dorm here at NYU didn’t so I had to pay for one. It’s not that expensive when you think about what you’re getting.

There’s a few big, commercial Usenet providers. Some of the popular ones are Giganews, Easynews and News Hosting. I’d recommend Giganews in a heartbeat because that’s what I used so I know first-hand that it’s excellent.

What you’re paying for when you subscribe to these services—it’s like $20-$25 per month for unlimited downloads—is access to their Usenet server. Once you have access to a server, either via your ISP or one of the commercial guys, you’ll have access to the files. Now you’ll need a news reader. Wikipedia has a giant list of news readers, but here’s two right off the bat. If you use a Mac, get Unison, which I endorsed a few days ago. Windows users should get Grabit, which my brother uses. He says it’s pretty good. Then again, I haven’t used Windows for six years.

[photopress:usee1.jpg,full,center]

Setup. Type something like “Giganews” or “RoadRuner” for the description (it doesn’t matter), then the server address in the appropriate field. The server address can be found deep inside you’re ISP’s Web site or (usually) in the “welcome aboard” e-mail that the commercial guys will send you. If you’re using an ISP’s server odds are you won’t have to input a username or password. I don’t and never did have to when using my ISP. For the commercial ones, yes, use the username/password either you picked or what they gave you. That might vary from service to service. Port 119 for the win.

[photopress:usee2.jpg,full,center]

Somewhere around the server settings you’ll want to set how many headers you want to download. (Think of headers as the individual messages. They’re not really, but this isn’t being posted in alt.technical-nonsense, now is it?) My connection is pretty damn fast so I have it set to download 5 million headers. Yes, 5M. You’ll want to set this number pretty high in order to have access to as many files as possible, NZBs notwithstanding. I’ll address NZBs in a minute.

OK, so your newsreader is configured. Treat yourself.

Now you’re ready to party.

[photopress:usee3.jpg,full,center]

Real men browse Usenet groups manually. What I usually do now is choose a group that interests me, like, say, alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.dance and look through it at my leisure. Oh look, a new Markus Schultz remix. Downloaded. Oh wow, this week’s Trance Around the World. Downloaded. (Yes, I know the pics don’t match. Creative license and all.) And so on. This method of downloading from Usenet takes a while because you have to wait for all the headers to load and then you have to sift through the material on your own. Again, that’s why I do, but I have all the time in the world to kill. Usenet amateurs like John Biggs—I taught him how to use it over AIM a few weeks ago—and my luddite brother rely on NZB files to download.

NZB files are, I think, metadata that simply tell your newsreader where on the Usenet sever (what group, what’s the exact file name, etc.) the files are. It’s sorta like a Torrent file. There’s no data there, just a pointer in the right direction. NZB files are created magically by Web sites. My brother swears by NZBIndex.nl (probably because it’s free) but Newzbin is the original and costs 60 cents per week, or $2.40 per month. From there, you’d browse their listings like you would any Torrent site. Look—someone posted No Country for Old Men in the high-def group. Grab the NZB file then double click it and you’ll be downloading as soon as your newsreader launches.

That screenshot I have of the dance binary group shows vanilla MP3s, but a lot of the bigger groups split files up into rar files. Please tell me you know how to use those. A lot of time, you’ll also find Par files. Should anything happen to your files while they’re being downloaded (or maybe they were posted corruptly to begin with), the Par files will repair them. I don’t know how, some algorithm. I use MacPar Deluxe, and QuickPar seems to be popular on Windows.

That’s a quick little primer on Usenet. I suggest you Google around for more information. (Fact—I first discovered Usenet when I was looking for Futurama episodes back in 8th grade. Then I branched out into video games, movies, music, all of it. No one helped me other than some random guys in IRC.)

Hmm, what else? Oh, key groups to keep an eye on.

• alt.binaries.sounds.complete_cd
• alt.biaries.cd.image
• alt.binaries.divx
• alt.binaries.hdtv.x264 (high-def movie rips)

Those are the ones I browse daily, especially the CD one and the x264 one. I practically live there!

BitTorrent users should know that pretty much all the scene stuff that you find on your go-to Web site is on Usenet several hours beforehand.

HTH

There’s lots of speculation around why DivX is shutting the site down, ranging from piracy issues to the spiraling CDN costs of streaming all that HD content. But what really happened, according to multiple sources, is that a ridiculous battle of egos at the DivX board level caused most of the team to simply quit. DivX, essentially, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

First a bit of history – just before DivX went public in late 2006 it launched Stage6 as a way to show off the capabilities of the DivX codec. Without any promotion at all the site quickly gathered users. By mid 2007, when the site went into beta, it had millions of users and tens of millions of page views. The high quality video was key – users simply flocked to it.

DivX cofounder and CEO Jordan Greenhall knew he had a potential hit on his hands. He decided to explore a sale of Stage6, and hired investment bank Montgomery & Co. to see who might buy it. He also started pitching VCs on the idea of funding it as a spinoff. Given the conflict of interest, he resigned as CEO of DivX – president Kevin Hell took over the company. Darrius Thompson, (DivX co-founder), Mark How (DivX VP Business Development), Mark Chweh, Chester Ng and about 20 other DivX employees joined him. All shared the title of “cofounder” at Stage6.

Montgomery spent the second half of 2007 pitching Stage6 to buyers, although there wasn’t much interest. But VCs were eager to buy in to the idea of a spinoff. By November they had commitments from Crosslink Capital, Sofinnova France and Mission Ventures to invest $20 million at a $90 million post money valuation. Another $5 million was committed from a strategic investor, plus $2 million more from “friends and family.” All in all, Stage6 was preparing to close a $27 million round. DivX was to retain 20% ownership in the new funded entity.

Not only was DivX to receive a substantial chunk of equity in the new company, they’d be able to get the operating costs, estimated to be around $1 million/month in CDN costs alone, off their books. And Stage6 was to give most of their 2008 revenues back to Divx as well.

Those revenues were not immaterial. Everyone who views a video on Stage6 must first download the DivX player. Packaged with the download was an option to download the Yahoo Toolbar. The revenue from Yahoo to DivX is around $16 million per year. Our sources estimate that half that, or around $8 million/year, was due to Stage6 downloads. And that share was growing – 2008 toolbar revenues may have been as high as $10 million, making Stage6 almost breakeven.

At a meeting in late November the DivX board was asked to approve the spinoff and venture financing. But at the last minute the board decided to cancel the spinoff and retain control of Stage6. It’s not clear why they did this – perhaps they were surprised at the valuation and wanted to keep control of the assets. Or perhaps the revenue from Stage6 was too material for them to let it go over the long run. From what we hear a massive battle of ego’s ultimately killed the deal. But when the decision was made, the key Stage6 founders resigned. DivX made a brief announcement about Greenhall’s departure, and added that it “expects to take additional time to consider the alternatives available to the Company related to the future of the Stage6 service.”

From that point everyone expected DivX to just continue to run the site. But over December and January they may have become concerned again about the costs of streaming the video and running the site without most of the key team there to look after things. Three weeks ago, we hear, DivX re-approached Greenhall and asked if they’d like to do the original deal. Greenhall declined.

So then DivX announced the closure of Stage6. When it shuts down all those millions of DivX downloads and associated Yahoo revenue goes away with it. At the end of the day DivX threw out the baby, the bathwater, millions of dollars in revenue and tens of millions of users. Their board and executive team, in short, look like fools. Investors seem to agree – the stock hit an all time low today.

DivX declined to comment on this post.

The site won’t be around long, though, Uploads have already been shut down, and the site itself will go offline on February 28. The official reason: “So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide.”

Translated, that may be that the pirates took over the site. New movies and tv shows were constantly being uploaded and then taken down by the site staff. Sites like Joox.net took all that pirated content and repackaged it on their own site. The combined costs of hosting, plus all the monitoring for infringement, may have been more than Divx was willing to deal with.

Update: Ok, we’ve been shaking the trees on this story a little. According to one source, the planned spinoff of Stage6 from DivX apparently had $24 million or so in committed venture capital but negotiations with the DivX board broke down over ownership percentages. We’re still digging.

Update2: Comscore says Stage6 has 17.4 million monthly unique visitors and 360 million page views. We also hear that their monthly CDN bill from LimeLight is $1 million, about 11% of their revenues. That’s going to hurt them.

As always, Penny-Arcade flies above all of our stupidity to make a point: what makes the iTunes Rental service so different from DIVX, the failed disc format? That all-mighty, all-knowing Apple is behind it? That it has the support of all the studios?

Are you really going to stop downloading movies from the usual places?

::Taps nose::

What Goes Around [Penny-Arcade]