Just ahead of the widely anticipated launch later this month of Sony and Nintendo's next-generation consoles, rival Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 has been available for about a year now, is announcing movie and TV downloads via its Xbox Live online marketplace. For now, consumers have shown that they prefer to watch movies on TV screens rather than their PC or laptop. It's not straightforward to send a film downloaded from the Web to a TV, which is what Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on: Xbox owners are already connected to the TV--and in most cases, the Internet, too. …

Fall has not been good to Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit that oversees Fox's Web sites, including MySpace. Last week, Mark Jung, the company's COO, quietly stepped aside after just nine months on the job. However, Jung's pedigree didn't really have anything to do with MySpace: he was co-founder of IGN Entertainment, a Web portal for 18-34 males covering entertainment and video games. The sale of his company was tied-in with the $650 million deal that brought MySpace to News Corp. Ross Levinsohn, FIM's CEO, said Jung is "an entrepreneur at heart," who left the company for …

When the Sony Expo unveiled Sony's PlayStation 3--which hits shelves in less than two weeks--gamers stood in line, dumbstruck by what they saw. Thousands were on hand--mostly male, ranging from pre-teens with braces to baby-boomer hippies. The PS3, at $600, will also top many post-holiday shopping balance sheets. Even at that price, Sony won't even be breaking even on what it spent on production. In other words, Sony hopes millions will buy. At the moment, supply is easily outstripping demand for the new next-gen system. People looking to cash in on the phenomenon are selling their pre-reserved PS3 …

Here's a disruptive technology: Paul Shen's TVUPlayer allows users to stream live TV broadcasts to one another via the Internet. Think Napster for TV broadcasts: a peer-to-peer streaming network without licenses and without limits on the length of the video. Once users download the TVUPlayer, they can upload and receive broadcasts over a network. The blogging community has been giving this thing rave reviews, apparently. One of the main ideas here is that broadcasting costs suddenly become exponentially lower than those of today's streaming technology. But is this legal? How does it plan to make money? In an interview …

It is the largest such survey of next-generation Internet experts ever: 86% of more than 1,000 experts say they worry about the progress made by other nations relative to the United States, in addressing the new scheme known as Internet Protocol version 6. What is it? Wikipedia says the main thing that Ipv6 provides is an increase in the number of unique Web addresses assignable to network devices. That includes anything from cell phones to portable game machines to, someday, lights in your house. IPv4 is the current scheme widely used, which provided about 4.3 billion total addresses--less than …

Signing rights deals with major media companies is more complicated than Google and YouTube thought. As copyright infringement persists unheeded on Google's new viral video property, unhappy media companies are spelling out just how difficult it's going to be for the cavalier Internet giant to shore up the licensing deals it needs. YouTube execs are finding it a slog to get all of the necessary permissions to license the songs and shows that users are putting on its site. YouTube's existing agreement with major record companies doesn't cover royalties for music publishers that control the copyrights to the lyrics …

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has a brand new idea, but Wall Street is concerned that the online retailer should be minding the store instead of venturing off in new directions. What's the big idea? Called the Elastic Compute Cloud, the article says it offers a Web technology whose "cheap, raw computing power could be tapped on the Internet just like electricity." The launch is scheduled for Nov. 8 at the Web 2.0 conference. Bezos wants to transform Amazon into a 21st-century digital utility; he wants to be the pipes that run your Internet business. It's as if Wal-Mart announced …

Put a compelling commercial on YouTube and watch it take off without spending a penny--that's the lesson from Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty." The 75-second viral film, "Dove Evolution," has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube as well as free coverage from talk shows such as "Ellen," "Entertainment Tonight" and "The View," and "Today." Props should be extended to Ogilvy & Mather, the ad shop behind the spot, which created the biggest online-buzz generator in the U.S. personal-care and beauty industries. If your message resonates with consumers (like the majority of women, who don't look like supermodels), …

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt held a candid talk earlier this week with its media division NBC Universal in which he declared NBC's days of broadcast dominance to be over, adding that the media giant must now focus on expanding its digital business. "You know we probably overpaid for iVillage," he said, but was optimistic about the unit's prospects for growth, which he said could be "30% a year for as long as the eye can see." NBC Universal bought iVillage for $600 million in March--about the same price News Corp. paid for MySpace parent Intermix Media. He added …

The Financial Times makes Google's quest to halt the legal threat surrounding new property YouTube sound a little more urgent than the companies would have you believe. Google has gone to CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp. and others offering tens of millions of dollars in upfront money for the right to broadcast their video content legally on YouTube. With the calm of an airline pilot, CEO Eric Schmidt maintains that "so far people like that message; they are now trying to figure out what to do about it--should they, should they not, under what terms, and those …