Mos Def has partnered with clothing company LnA to develop a line of shirts to promote his new album The Ecstatic. Each shirt features an album cover on the front and a track list with a special download code on the back. If you buy the shirt, you get the album for free. SoundScan has even agreed to count the shirt as an album sale. Not a bad deal for a twofer (as long as the shirt is reasonably priced that is). Although, for the record, I prefer Trent Reznor’s free model. [Woooha]

Accessing Viera Cast is as simple as pressing the button on their remote. It opens up a screen with both the YouTube and Picasa option on the screen, along with three boxes on either side that you can customise with favourite bookmarked videos or albums. Navigation is done through the remote.

But the real opportunity in Viera Cast is that the service is hosted by Panasonic, which means they can bring new functionality to the service without the need for a firmware upgrade or a download to your player. Which makes the entire upgrade not only free and easy for all Panasonic Blu-ray owners, but also essentially future-proofs your Blu-ray purchase.

What Panasonic needs to do now is actively pursue relationships with online content services. Yahoo widgets would be an ideal place to start, especially considering that implementing them should be extremely simple. The next company would be Blockbuster for downloadable movies. Considering that Blockbuster already has an arrangement with TiVo in Australia, and is actively looking for more partners worldwide for their Ondemand service, partnering with Panasonic shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.

Of course, there are lots of discussions that need to happen before any of these services are announced, let alone implemented, so we’ll be waiting a while in any case. But let’s just hope that Panasonic are thinking the same way we are, and that their new Blu-ray lineup could be the all in one box under the TV we’ve always wanted.

Let me backtrack for a moment. Someone I know has a birthday coming up, and one item I’d really like to get them is an XBLA (Xbox Live) title. Since the game isn’t available in stores, that means I have two solutions. One, I can sneak onto their Xbox like a ninja, enter my credit card info and make the purchase for them (which is just sort of creepy), or two, I can give them an Xbox gift card for the sum of the game.

I’m not really happy with either option.

My sincere gesture, giving a friend a game they’d enjoy because I’ve accounted for their tastes, is diluted to an exchange of capital. It’s really just giving them cash in a nicer form. Sure, you can buy someone a gift card, but you can’t actually buy them a gift.

This is a problem.

Today, the limitation is probably only bugging me and a handful of other uber nerds. But what about in four or five years? We’re a society that’s only moving more and more digital. Soon, even giving someone a CD may very well seem like a dated gesture—one that may inconvenience the recipient since, hell, they don’t have a CD drive anymore!

I just don’t want to be condemned to a life of gift cards with a little note written in Sharpie “for the new Batman.”

Luckily, implementing gift giving on a service like Xbox Live would be incredibly easy. They already have the infrastructure to manage various payment accounts and allow users to communicate to one another and a central server. So imagining a system in which you receive a message informing you that Sk8rB0y has sent you a game is by no means a far stretch. (The feature would probably take Microsoft all of a week to complete, if they put their mind to it.)

But what about an iTunes? UPDATE: They actually offer gifting through email. That’s something I didn’t realise and I’m guessing a lot of people don’t realise. Including even custom playlists, I’ll admit, it’s a good start. My question to you is, do you consider an email link enough? Does that feel like a gift?

Maybe it’s just my perspective that will be forced to change as I bow to the next level of consumerism. But for the moment, the gift card approach feels like a one size fits some philosophy being squeezed over nearly the entire modern home entertainment industry—and I can’t imagine it’s adding a lot of humanity to the already cold digital realm.

To be fair, Sony’s licensing agreement claims “Content cannot be redownloaded once it has been downloaded to either a PLAYSTATION 3 or PSP system.” In other words, anyone who has downloaded a film has agreed to this arrangement fair and square. But making a call to Sony in the instance where you delete the movie can grant you a one time exception.

Just all the more reason why digital downloads make for a great way to rent a movie, but a crappy way to buy a movie. [arstechnica]

For a start, it’s so packed full of restrictions that it makes Cuba look like the centre of the free world. First off, there’s the Windows Media association – we knew this was always going to happen, but it essentially means that Mac and Linux users are a no-go. And, of course, anyone who uses an iPod – each song is WMA with DRM, so only Plays For Sure MP3 players will work with this service.

Then there’s the track limits. For $29 a month you get – wait for it – the ability to download 300 songs each month. Over time, that’s probably not too bad a proposition – 3,600 songs each year isn’t terrible value for money. But that first month, when you want to load up your non-iPod MP3 player… You can only grab 300 songs. Worse is that if you do download more than 300, there are excess charges, although what they are isn’t spelled out on the LoadIt website. As a point of reference, Napster’s subscription service in the US offers unlimited downloads for US$12.95 a month.

And finally, there’s the subscription model itself. You pay $29 a month for your music. After a year you might have built up a decent collection. But if you stop paying your subscription fees, all that music will disappear like smoke in the wind, and you’ll be left with nothing but a credit card debt and an empty MP3 player.
Of course, the LoadIt store also offers pay-by-the-track downloads that you actually get to own and keep, but once again they’re loaded with DRM in WMA format. With BigPond’s announcement of DRM-free MP3 music this week, there is no reason whatsoever to buy individual tracks from Sanity.

In addition to the online store, there will also be in-store kiosks that allow you to download tunes. Considering they won’t work on iPods, these have a very limited appeal as well.

If the LoadIt store had launched back in April 2007 when it was supposed to, perhaps we wouldn’t be so harsh. But the simple fact is that the world has moved on – BigPond and iTunes are selling DRM free music and iTunes is selling movies as well. The Sanity option really does feel like they missed the boat, and are now desperately waving on the shore, hoping that the digital music ship comes back to port to pick them up. But we wouldn’t hold our breath on that one, Sanity.

[LoadIt]

Massachusetts, Wyoming, and Washington are gearing up for their bills, just to name a few. It’s actually kinda surprising it took this long for the taxes to start piling on. Most of the initial considerations about squashing a nascent market are nearly moot this point, in any case, with the digital market booming. I mean, when 30 percent of music revenues in the U.S. are digital, and the biggest music retailer in the world deals exclusively in digital content, you know the tax collector is going to be slinking close behind.

The one thing that might save us from being taxed is geography. States can only tax businesses that have a physical presence within their borders. Congress could change the law (and they probably will at some point), but in an election year, it’s unlikely (one reason to be glad the circus is in town until November). It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out–digital taxes seem like an inevitability, however. CNet points to NY as a bastion of tax-free sanity, but they’re trying to squeeze Amazon right now, so it seems like a safe bet the money they could bring from taxing downloads will look pretty damn tangible. [Cnet]