• CBS Audience Network: Featuring a variety of shows from CBS Primetime, Daytime, Extras, and TV Classics, including full-length episodes of current TV shows, CBS Classics TV shows, short clips, and Web originals.
• Full Zune Video Podcast Library: Thousands of hours of entertainment with full TV episodes, webisodes, clips, and videos from providers including ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, CNET TV, Comedy Central, Current TV, The Discovery Channel, Fox, G4 TV, HBO, MSNBC, NBC, Showtime, and Revision 3, along with some of the best user-generated videos on the Web. Some video podcasts are also available in HD.
• MSN and msnbc.com: Clips as well as full length episodes from TV shows such as Arrested Development, news and weather from MSNBC, editor picks and most popular videos, five day weather forecasts, news, video playlists, music videos, movie trailers and more.

If you haven’t already noticed the upgrades in your Windows 7 Media centre menu, you can manually update by going into Tasks >>Settings >> General >> Automatic Download Options.

First, the Windows 7 stuff. The ability to add any old CableCARD tuner to your setup is realised, as we just shoved on a tuner and Windows 7 automatically recognised it and installed the correct drivers. The setup with Comcast was fairly simple, as all we had to do was run through the Tuner setup program, and all Comcast had to do was read some numbers back to home base and have them activate the CableCARD.

The copy freely features work just as you’d imagine. There’s not much to “show”, in that all it enables is the ability to watch your recorded shows on any other PC. So we copied a recording off of the Zone Pro, onto another Windows 7 PC, and it played back fine.

To enable this, you need Windows 7 and you need to upgrade your firmware on your ATI Tuner—the latter will be available for free from ATI and other OEMs, depending on where you bought your current tuner. The new format for recorded TV, .WTV, is also key, so if you recorded something on a Vista machine, you wouldn’t be able to share it with other computers on your network (obviously). Eventually there will be third-party transcoders that can take the .WTV file and make it capable of being read on Zunes and iPhones. And with the Zune HD, you’ll be able to handle HD recordings as well.

As for Windows 7 media centre itself, the Zone Pro handles it just fine. All the effects are there, such as transparent overlay, are there, and the box can handle two simultaneous tuners at once. Pretty amazing, seeing as the size of one of the external tuners is basically the same size of the Zone Pro itself.

Niveus will start shipping the Zone Pro with Windows 7 to arrive by Win 7’s launch. [Niveus]

What it means to you, theoretically, is that you should be able to go out and buy CableCARD tuners and add them to your Windows 7 machines to turn any old machine you have lying around into an HTPC. Also, they’ve raised the limit to four tuners per “tuner type”, so you can have four digital cable channels simultaneously without any kind of special setup.

There is also a new Firmware update for ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuners to mark copy-freely content—the content you can move around your network and portable devices. [Microsoft]

It looks like there’s always going to be a tradeoff when choosing software to move media from your PC to a PS3, Xbox 360 or any of the other DLNA-compatible hardware that plugs into your TV. PlayOn, for example, has built-in support for Hulu, ESPN, CNN, Netflix, and CBS—but it costs $US40 and can’t handle RSS, audio or photo streaming. For our money, we’d go with TVersity, mostly because there’s no money involved. [TubeCentric]

Sonic (makers of Roxio) are bringing CinemaNow to the Wii. CinemaNow, in case you’ve forgotten, offers streaming movies (a catalog of about 14,000), short films, and concerts for rent or purchase. They haven’t gotten much of a foothold here in the States despite being around since 1999, even after being bought by Blockbuster a few years back. They’ve got a decent catalog, especially for new releases, and have partnered with all kinds of software, so the Wii should be no problem for them.

It might be more of a toe in the water than a real balls-out jump, but we’re glad Nintendo is open to expanding the Wii’s media capabilities. Remember, it’s Japan-only for now, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of integration appear Stateside. Press release to follow. [CinemaNow]

Fujisoft Teams with Sonic Solutions to Deliver Hollywood Hits to

Nintendo Wii Game Console

Roxio CinemaNow Begins Streaming Movies from Paramount Pictures

Novato, California (June 25, 2009) – Sonic Solutions® (NASDAQ: SNIC), today announced that it is partnering with Fujisoft Incorporated to deliver premium entertainment to the Nintendo Wii game console. Sonic’s Roxio CinemaNow® will be providing Hollywood content, beginning with new releases and catalog titles from Paramount Pictures, for Fujisoft’s video-on-demand service in Japan, called “Minna no theatre Wii” (Everyone’s theatre Wii). The companies will continue to work together in order to expand the range of entertainment available for virtually instant streaming to the TV via the popular game console.

“Sonic is a key content partner, enabling us to greatly enrich the video entertainment options available to Wii customers,” said Minoru Yoshida, Executive Managing Director, Fujisoft. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Sonic and providing consumers trouble-free access to more great Hollywood entertainment at home.”

“Increasingly, consumers are looking to access and enjoy movies via their connected entertainment devices, whether at home or on-the-go,” said Alex Carloss, Executive Vice President, Digital Distribution, Paramount Digital Entertainment. “Therefore we are delighted to become the first major studio offering video-on-demand through the Nintendo Wii.”

Roxio CinemaNow offers a broad selection of regularly updated premium video entertainment for rental or purchase, including new releases from major Hollywood studios often on the same day the DVD is available in stores. CinemaNow’s cloud-based media services power devices from multiple manufacturers, forming a connected ecosystem that consumers can use to seamlessly choose, move and view video entertainment.

“Fujisoft is a renowned technology thought leader and major supplier of embedded software for everything from mobile devices to digital home electronics, so we are extremely pleased to be collaborating with them to bring Hollywood movies to the Wii,” said Mark Ely, executive vice president of strategy, Sonic Solutions. “Thanks to this new relationship with Fujisoft, consumers now have another convenient way to access high-quality entertainment from Roxio CinemaNow.”

Premium entertainment from Roxio CinemaNow is currently available on a range of devices including Blu-ray Disc players from LG Electronics, Dell PCs, and Archos portable media players. As well as being available on a range of consumer electronics, Roxio CinemaNow is currently powering internet movie delivery for Blockbuster and is instantly accessible through Bestbuy.com.

Microsoft has added Netflix accessibility directly in the Windows Media Centre application, providing a Netflix section under the TV+Movies tab. This means that users are able to not only stream movies and TVs instantly through the application, but also manage both their instant and DVD queues, and search/filter searches through the entire Netflix library without having to open up a browser to access the site first. To further enhance the experience, these Netflix actions can also be controlled using any Windows Media Center-compatible remote control, allowing you to instantly watch movies without having to add them to your queue, and easily rewind and fast-forward during playback, thus transforming your personal PC into your own mini home entertainment system.

I wish it was even larger. Large enough to control the TV with my butt. [Michbex via Hacked Gadgets]

The channel goes live now, and gives men’s college basketball coverage by providing 1-2 minute highlights of every game, post game interviews, buzzer beaters (the last 2-10 minutes in a very tight game), and full games in “condensed” form. The condensed form means you won’t see time-outs and half-time, but you will see all of the standard play. It’s free for Windows Vista media centre users, which is kind of a fantastic deal if you’re a sports fan.

Microsoft plans to add more content in a similar vein (more sports, possibly TV and movie content) in the future, but they can’t give any details.

AU: Don’t hold your breath, Australia.