This is going to be very cool. For those who get Netflix today, you may not know that you can stream movies to your home PC already, this is going to make that awesome. It will allow you to hook up a setup top box, made my LG, to your TV and stream movies from Netflix using the Internet.

I watch movies on my TV today but it is not as slick as this would be. I first have to hookup a PC to the TV. This is not a big deal for me cause I am such a computer geek. Then I just use my wireless keyboard and go to Netflix and click on “Watch Now” and am off and running.

This works but just using the remote control would be nice too!

The company wants to strike deals with electronics companies that will let it send movies straight to TV screens over the Internet. Its first partnership, announced Wednesday night, is with the South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics to stream movies and other programming to LG’s high-definition televisions.

Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said he hoped to strike other such deals and that Netflix would soon be viewed as a movie channel that might appear on myriad devices.

“We want to be integrated on every Internet-connected device, game system, high-definition DVD player and dedicated Internet set-top box,” he said. “Eventually, as TVs have wireless connectivity built into them, we’ll integrate right into the television.”

The move could help transform Netflix from a successful company with a cumbersome dependence on physical media and the Postal Service into an important player in a rapidly emerging digital media landscape.

Mr. Hastings said the new service would combine the benefits of an Internet browser with the luxury of watching movies and TV shows on large, high-definition TV screens. He said subscribers would be able to go to the Netflix Web site to create lists of movies they wanted to see. The Netflix service on the TV would offer a simple way to watch those movies.

“We think we have solved the real fundamental problem, which has been that choosing movies on a television has been extremely challenging,” Mr. Hastings said. “Video-on-demand companies worked at it for a long time, but choosing movies on the TV just doesn’t have the power of the Web.”

Netflix Partners With LG to Bring Movies Straight to TV

Humm … I just need some good ideas …

Startup incubators turned into cash incinerators during the dotcom bubble and burst. Now they’re back, and Business 2.0 looks at whether they’re any better at breeding the next Google.

Naval Ravikant is a classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur: He never stops moving. In the past decade, he’s helped launch four companies, including consumer reviews site Epinions, and invested in many more as a VC, including blog aggregator Technorati.

And he isn’t about to slow down now. His next project, he explains while jogging around a Peet’s Coffee & Tea in San Francisco, will bring a group of engineers together, share resources, crank out a bunch of Web-based companies, and hope for at least one hit that makes a pile of money for the whole enterprise.

Sound familiar?

Return of the startup factory

Here you have a neat idea to make phone service work on the Internet. You put out some television commercials, dumb ones I think, and them get you a whole slew of customers.

Then it comes to light that you really stole/used/infringed on some patents and your life is going downhill fast. This little bump or pothole as it will turn out will cost you $58 million and you are no longer allowed to get new customers to sqweeze money out of to pay for you big screw up, which is the most likely outcome from the courts in the coming weeks.

But until they stay, “STOP” you can sign people up if they are not aware of your big screw up. A simple Google search is good information for the consumer.

Is this little fact or fiction? It is fact. Poor Vonage is slowly going downhill. Good luck if you are a customer. But I would guess, that someone will pick them up cheap.

Vonage says it may face bankruptcy

As Vonage Faces Potential Bankruptcy, Deal Rumors Heat Up

Popular Mechanics was definitely ahead of the curve when it came recognizing the fact that copy protection can stifle innovation:
It used to be that programs were easy to copy and change. But manufacturers began to lose money as many people made copies of software and gave them to their friends.

Now, many manufacturers have figured out how to “copy-protect” discs. A copy-protected disc—like a cartridge—can’t be copied or changed.

To our mind this is a disaster: Most people learn programming by changing programs to fit their own needs. This capability of customization is what makes computers so attractive. New ways of copy protection will probably be found soon. Until then, a computer owner may have to put up with being “locked out” of his own machine.

Modern Mechanix » Popular Mechanics Compares 6 Top Computers

Has Apple done it again? The buzz seems to think they have. Their stock went up 4% the day after the iPhone was unleashed at MacWorld.

Two Words:

Really Cool

I know a few people that will be wanting a couple of these …

Hitachi announced yesterday, just before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, that it will be shipping a 1TB hard drive by the end of the first quarter in 2007.

The 3.5″ Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 will run at 7200 rpm, have a 32MB buffer, and be available as SATA 3.0Gb/s or Parallel-ATA 133.

A 1TB hard drive for $399 is likely to be an instant hit among early adopters and video pros. That price translates to about 40 cents per gigabyte, or 0.04 cents per megabyte.

1TB drives getting ready to hit the streets

Are you ready? Could you “cut” the cable or knock down your dish and rely on the Internet for all of your watching?

It was the ultimate challenge for any lifelong TV watcher. Wired News asked me to cut the coax cable snaking into my HD-ready television, and for 30 days rely solely on legally available internet content to satisfy the video entertainment needs of my family of five.

We posed the question: Is the internet finally ready to kill old-school television?

The rules were simple: Anything I could download was fair game, but there’d be no TV signal via cable, satellite or the airwaves. We decided that watching television that had been cached on the family’s TiVo box was also cheating, so that went into the closet. At my editor’s insistence, I physically severed the cable between the wall and my television with wire clippers. And on a blustery November day, my cable company came and took my set-top box away.

Wired News: Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband