It is a good thing Google has synchronized the its recently upgraded movie rental service across the YouTube and Android brands. It was easy to get confused this week. Early in the week Google announced that it was adding 3,000 top tier releases to its heretofore-minor collection of online rentals. A day later the same movies are at the Android Marketplace.

One of the most successful branding campaigns of the last decade paired nerdy looking John Hodgman and laidback, too-hip-to-seem-hip Justin Long in Apple's now-iconic PC vs. Mac series of ads that harpooned all of the Windows platform familiar weaknesses. From its basic unhipness to its notorious restarts, and even to the Vista debacle, Apple was merciless in its targeting of the rival, dominant operating system. The beauty of the campaign is that unlike other brand-on-brand hit jobs the ads rarely seemed mean. The haplessness of Hodgman's persona and the familiarity of the anti-PC complaints somehow insulated Apple from looking unfair. …

Land Rover certainly knew its youthful target market's cultural history when it designed a truly novel online campaign for the upcoming Evoque compact car line. Most of these urban-dwelling late twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings surely recall the enormously popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books that let kids pick endings and paths through a story line. The Being Henry interactive movie at HelloEvoque.com/beinghenry puts that format to the service of introducing the highly customizable new car. Dubbing itself "An Interactive Action-Love-Fantasy-Comedy-Adventure About Choices," the ploy ends up being effective and absorbing despite the overtly manipulative tone of the premise.

How many years has it been since we all settled on standardized WiFi protocols? For all of the progress we have made in compatibility, WiFi remains the most inscrutable, consumer-unfriendly and ultimately unreliable piece of the connected home. When my Apple TV HD trailers take forever to buffer and play I still don't know who to blame: my WiFi connection, ISP, Apple's pokey iTunes servers, or the fact that my cat passing across the living room may have disrupted the bouncing "N" radio waves. And so I was pleasantly surprised that at least one content provider recognized the issue and …

Any American kid with half an ounce of good old native wiseassism in him was reared on Mad magazine. And somewhere on the edge of most of our consciousness was this pale echo of Mad, Cracked magazine. Always feeling that Cracked was an obvious wannabe Mad, I have to admit I rarely ventured into its pages. Only in adulthood did I discover that many of the writers and artists who graced Mad also came in and out of Cracked's stables since its inception in 1958. So imagine my surprise when I happened upon the now defunct humor mag online at …

The explosion in syndicated content, easily embeddable code, and the torrents of clips coming to the Web are paying off in streaming media pretty much everywhere. According to the third annual survey of web media companies by D S Simon, 85% of them now carry video, representing an increase of a third from last year. Television media was already at peak penetration, with 96% of venues carrying clips, but the 2011 Web Influencers Study found that virtually every other category of news, especially newspapers and radio, now make video de rigueur.

The takedown of the Sony Playstation Network is big news for gamers, but it probably should be a chilling cautionary tale that deserved greater attention outside the realm of Portal 2 junkies. For those not up to speed, the network that serves tens of millions of PS3 (50 million sold) and PSP owners worldwide got breached last week by intruders, which exposed personal information from millions of members to some hackers out there. It is still unclear to Sony or anyone but the intruders whether credit card information was taken. But the breach prompted Sony to take down and reengineer …

Anything that gets my night owl teenage daughter up at 4 am has got to be an event. In fact, taking my own friends as a focus group I expect a massive number of moms and their daughters set the alarm for early morning to catch the Royal Wedding of Kate and William on Friday. Many of them likely were parallel streaming Web coverage, no doubt. Nielsen reports that 23 million people watched the event on TV across 11 different networks.

Like old VHS tapes, things do pile up here in the VidBlog during a week covering the latest news, marketing models and new releases. Here are just a few things we didn't get to this week.

I admit to losing track of the great Web original series, Goodnight Burbank. These comedy shorts, set in a fictional local TV station workplace, had been among my video podcast favorites for years even as it went in and out of season breaks. That is saying something for the Web, where much more ambitious Web series from film and TV talent usually become one-Webisode wonders everyone forgets to watch. The show has not only survived for five years (with a long hiatus in the last year) but it is coming to Hulu this week as the first Web-only scripted comedy …