Lately, Amazon has been beefing up its movie and television offerings, likely in anticipation of the release of its rumored tablet.
First, Amazon signed a deal with CBS to offer Amazon Prime subscribers shows like Star Trek and Cheers, and as of last Thursday, Amazon also has an agreement with NBCUniversal.
You’ve probably seen the hit CBS show NCIS and if you’ve always wanted to help Gibbs and the gang search crime scenes, evaluate evidence and arrest “bad guys,” now’s your chance. NCIS: The Game from the TV Show for iPad was released today and it’s been quickly climbing the charts.
Based on NCIS and its cast of characters, this new app from GameHouse promises to keep you busy with both action and mini-games, like matching fingerprints and autopsies. Choose from five different options when you start the game and receive step-by-step instructions as you move along. Help Gibbs, DiNozzo, Ducky, Ziva and McGee as they gather clues at the scene and then pass those clues on to Abby for evaluation in the lab. Use what you’ve found during the search to question suspects at varying levels of intensity, but don’t get too carried away. The harder you are on them, the less helpful suspects become, making your crime fighting more challenging.
Complete with the NCIS theme song, the NCIS: The Game from the TV Show for iPad is available in the App Store for 60% off for the first 48 hours after release. You can become the special agent you’ve always wanted to be for $2.99, but hurry, sales ends September 9th.
The iPad is the perfect mobile device to watch TV on the go or while sitting around the house. Many movie and TV companies like Netflix, ABC, and CBS have embraced the iPad and created apps or retooled their websites to support the new device. So with all the attention on the iPad and the new iPhone 4, wouldn’t you target an iOS device if you were launching a new mobile TV service? Not if you’re Fox Mobile.
Fox Mobile just launched their new Bitbop mobile TV subscription service yesterday. The only problem, the TV service is exclusive for Blackberry users. That’s right, no iPhone or Android support for Fox’s new Bitbop service.
There are over 100 million iOS devices on the market today and each is capable of watching streamed video services over 3G or WiFi. You would think Fox would include support for iOS devices in their subscription TV service. This service limitation doesn’t appear to be another Flash related snub either, as the Blackberry devices also do not support Flash.
According to Joe Bilman, Fox Mobile Group, the reason for the focus on Blackberry is simple, “The potential of the smartphone has barely been tapped. Our goal is to provide consumers with an exciting new digital entertainment experience on their handheld devices and what better place to start than with the original and continuously innovative smartphone.”
According to MacRumors, CBS is moving forward with its plans to deliver its content to the iPad using standard-based HTML5 mechanisms. As we reported last month, the company is on track to have its full CBS.com line-up available in HTML5 by the start of the fall television season.
CBS is still fine-tuning its HTML5 delivery using episodes of Star Trek Enterprise, as the network’s target is to provide an experience as good as Flash. CBS Interactive (CBSi) Senior Vice President Anthony Soohoo recently stated that “What you see right now is a small, little experiment. We’re currently just testing for the time being. Our goal is over time at some point having content parity. The tools aren’t mature yet – security needs to be there, second thing we need is all the tracking and measurement. If we can’t track, we can’t monetize.”
CBS is playing catch-up with ABC, but chose a different path, as it does not plan to build a dedicated app, and decided to provide a browser-based experience to the iPad users.
Photo courtesy of MacRumors
If you’re waiting to watch Hulu on your iPad, it looks like you’ll need to wait a bit longer. Eugene Wei, VP of Product at Hulu announced on their blog that they will stick with Flash and not move to HTML5 in the near term.
“Let me address a related topic that’s been in the news a lot recently: HTML5. Plenty of users and members of the press ask about this topic all the time…We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs.”
This of course means iPhone, iPod and iPad users will still not be able to view any video from Hulu’s site for the foreseeable future. Hulu has been one of the top websites demanded by many of our readers.
Hulu’s announcement is a bit surprising as rival site CBS.com announced they would have all their CBS.com video available for the iPad this fall thanks to an HTML5 site redesign. Of course Hulu could decide to release a dedicated iPad app, much the same way ABC has done with their hit app, to deliver their video programming to iPad and iPhone owners.
We would be surprised if Hulu stays on the sideline much longer while rivals continue to release programming for iPhone and iPad users. This market is simply becoming to large and valuable for media companies to ignore.
As many predicted, Apple’s iPad has become a must-have device for video enthusiasts. The iPad’s high definition screen and small form factor make it convenient to carry around the house, or on the road, and watch great looking TV shows or movies.
ABC’s iPad application has been extremely popular here at PadGadget HQ and it looks like we are not the only ones that love ABC TV. Disney, ABC’s parent company, announced users have downloaded the app over 400,000 times and they have watched more than 1.5 million TV shows in the first month of the app being available on the market. That’s over 39 million minutes of Internet TV! With these numbers, it’s no wonder Hulu and CBS are looking to jump on the iPad TV bandwagon.
ABC recently updated their iPad app to add 3G wireless connectivity allowing iPad users to watch TV anyplace at anytime. There was some initial concern among readers that video quality while streaming over 3G vs WiFi would not be as good. Our informal tests showed the two devices produced similar results but WiFi still had the best video quality.
Curious what folks are watching on ABC? To date, the top five series viewed on the iPad are:
ABC was the first studio to deliver their TV programming to the iPad and it now looks like they’ll soon have company. The folks at NewTeeVee interviewed Anthony Soohoo, Senior VP and General Manager of CBS Interactive, and he told them that “by the start of the fall season it plans to have all the same video available on the Apple iPad that is available on CBS.com.”
CBS is taking a different route to the iPad than ABC. CBS will not deliver their programming via a dedicated application but will instead offer their TV episodes on a revamped CBS website supporting HTML 5 and H.264 video instead of Adobe’s Flash technology.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, has recently been on a crusade to convince media companies and studios to move their content off of Adobe’s Flash technology and on to open standards such as HTML 5 and H.264.
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