Streaming Video | featured news

Log onto popular video streaming websites on a Sunday during football season and you can usually find several channels showing decent-quality live feeds of the games.

Netflix and NBC Universal have struck a deal to load the streaming video site with tons of content from both NBC and its family of cable networks, including all 35 seasons of Saturday Night Live, and new episodes of the sketch comedy show the day after air.Saturday Night Live just aired its season premiere last night, but were not seeing the episode on Netflix. Apparently the deal hasnt been executed just yet.The day-after premiere episodes will continue through 2012, but neither Netflix nor NBC specified how long the other content deals will last.

Media chiefs this week sounded a note of caution on Apple's 99-cent digital-rental service for TV shows amid a division in the industry on whether to participate.

Google Inc.'s YouTube has launched a public test of a new live-streaming video service, the site's most ambitious foray into live programming.

In a sign that online streaming is coming to the forefront in Hollywood, films from Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will appear on Netflix's streaming service just three months after they appear on pay television.

Jonathan Strickland cut ties with his cable company a year ago, yet he continues to watch all his favorite TV shows. He has saved nearly $700 over the last year and, most importantly, he tasted the thrill of telling his cable provider to shove it.

YouTube's movie rental service is still in its infancy, and it still only offers a small selection of films, but that could change quickly. YouTube exec Hunter Walk told MediaPost that the site will soon offer its users the ability to charge rental fees for their uploaded videos.

In our early testing, iLounge has learned that some video delivery applications act differently over the 3G network than they do on Wi-Fi. The iPad's built-in YouTube application strips both standard and HD videos to a dramatically lower resolution over the cellular data connection, something that iTunes Store video previews notably do not do, instead staying at a higher quality and consuming a greater amount of data.

Sony Corp is bringing baseball to America's living rooms on its PlayStation 3 video game console, ratcheting up the competition in the race to become the digital hub of the home.

The mail order and online video service maintains blistering growth, with profits to match.