Keep in mind we’re not talking about the likes of VCast or the like. This is the real deal, live streaming TV straight from the networks to mobile devices. That could mean live sports, live sitcoms, live whatever-you-can-think-of TV on your phone.

Hopefully the mobile DVR apps will follow. [Press Release via Crunchgear]

iFrame’s based on industry-standard codecs H.264 and AAC, but it’s got a standard res of 960×540 and it’s designed by Apple “to speed up importing and editing by keeping the content in its native recorded format while editing”.

Currently, the only two camcorders using iFrame are the Sanyo VPC-HD2000A and VPC-FH1A. The question is what other cameras are gonna be using it and how much of a real standard iFrame’s going to be. We all know how much Apple loves setting standards. [Apple via CNET]

Turns out, according to some evidence (documents, conversations) Engadget got a hold of, that Apple actually brought the concept of an optical, one-size-fits-all standard to Intel. Apple apparently had some very specific requirements, which might be why Intel demonstrated Light Peak on a souped-up Hackintosh. There are some roadmaps from 2007 that suggest Apple may roll out Light Peak-equipped hardware early 2010, but more interestingly, Light Peak may be just right for the one gadget everyone wants to see: The infamous Apple Tablet.

A high-speed, one-size-fits-all port would be perfect for a razor-thin tablet, which has minimal space for an array of display, data and connectivity ports. This would be a ballsy move for Apple: USB 3.0 is just about ready to pop, and Apple could effectively skip over that standard for Light Peak. The tablet speculation is just that, speculation, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be true: Consolidation of ports is great for super thin gadgets, which after all is one of Apple’s current trademarks.

This isn’t the first time Apple’s had a heavy influence on emerging standards—check out our piece on the subject for a little history. [Engadget]

It seems funny to me that wireless N is finally coming around despite the fact that I have been using it for years. But what about you? What Wi-Fi standard do you use at home?

Supporting 1.5Gbps and 3.0Gbps transfer rates (peaking at half the speed of existing SATA), mSATA is intended for drives that are roughly the size of a business card.

Check out that lead shot. On the left, you see a small Toshiba drive using a traditional SATA connector. On the right, you see a Toshiba drive using the mSATA standard. (Incidentally, Toshiba will be offering that flash drive in 30 and 62GB sizes with 180MB/s read speeds and 50MB/s writes.) The end products aren’t really so different in terms of size, but the mSATA connection itself is, what, half the footprint of SATA?

Sounds good to us. [mSATA and Toshiba via Engadget]

They Call It “Open” For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilise the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by…Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By “standard”, we’re talking about a format, interface or programming tool that a bunch of companies or people or organisations agree is the way something’s going to get done, whether it’s how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won’t play on another, web sites that work in one browser don’t work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don’t make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn’t the only open standard that Apple’s had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you’re the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto “standards” enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 per cent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you’re making everybody else do things the way you want them done, but presumably without strong-arming. If you’re doubting how important standards are, look no further than Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it’ll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a “universal OS,” or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It’s so standards-compliant it tied with Opera’s Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What’s most striking about WebKit isn’t the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn’t just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the “real internet” is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple’s been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole “free and open” thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it’s too crappy to become the web’s default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe’s Flash. Apple says Ogg’s quality and hardware acceleration support don’t match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardised H.264 codec, which is tied up by licence issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG’s H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it’s in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft’s WMV didn’t become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It’s actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn’t become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC’s superiority to MP3: Microsoft’s WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can’t leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn’t work out. It’s a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple’s shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that’s also notably supported by Dell—which’ll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don’t see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That’s just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple’s had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn’t always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple’s position doesn’t allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet. They’ve actually made things better for the sake of making things better, at least so far. One glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they’re the most gracious tech company around reason to watch out for ulterior motives.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mum’s legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Kotaku says that the PC Gaming Alliance, a group of game developers and hardware makers, is working on building a standardised set of system requirements for PC gaming.

There aren’t a lot of details here (any, really), but from older articles, the PCGA has been wanting these ratings for a while. It’ll help people who are trying to buy a PC and need to know exactly which games it’ll be capable of playing, which is much different from the process of matching up video cards with benchmark scores that consumers have to do now.

Although their intentions seem to be good, firms like Activision Blizzard (maker of World of Warcraft and many other games) have left the alliance for some reason or another.

For more on the PC Gaming alliance, hit up Kotaku.

Freeview – that marketing push for the free-to-air networks that we love so much – has actually done something pretty decent in their standards by saying that any hardware that wants to receive the Freeview badge will need to be capable of receiving MPEG4 signals as well as MPEG2, essentially futureproofing the box for when the TV networks do make the switch to MPEG4.

There’s no timeframe for when that switch might happen though, and the Herald Sun’s report that it will all go down on May 1 (when the first Freeview product will hit shelves) completely misleads consumers with incorrect statements (”that expensive plasma or LCD will be obsolete from May 1″). Essentially it is up to individual broadcasters to decide when to make the switch, but seeing the confusion around the current switch to digital, my gut says it won’t happen for a while.

Freeview have issued a press release this morning refuting the Herald Sun article with the opening line setting the tone:

The Herald Sun newspaper (16 March, 2009) has misled Australians in a report that claimed millions of plasma and LCD televisions would become obsolete from 1 May, 2009 due to changes in the way broadcasters transmit.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of this entire issue is that even after two days, the Herald Sun still hasn’t changed, modified apologised or retracted the original article, even though they are evidently incorrect.

[Herald Sun]

If there’s a must-have mobile technology this year, that’s Bluetooth over Wi-Fi. Easy-to-establish, peer-to-peer Bluetooth connectivity seamlessly coupled with Wi-Fi speeds. As the video shows, the experience is perfect. I want this in my iPhone.

The new Bluetooth specification—technically denominated alternate MAC/PHY—will be official this April. And unlike other technologies, it won’t be in limbo for a while before reaching consumers. In fact, your phone may support it right now, according to Broadcom’s Mukul Suth: Some of their current production chips already have this ability and they will only require a software upgrade to implement it.

The alternate MAC/PHY method is quite clever: The two devices discover each other and shake hands using Bluetooth (being mobile phones, computers, or any other shiny thing supporting the standard). When you start any file transfer, the communication gets passed to the Wi-Fi hardware layer, which will transfer your data at 54mbps. Once the transfer is over, Wi-Fi is disconnected and the control passes again to Bluetooth.

It just works. According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the standard will allow you to easily:

• Wirelessly bulk synchronise music libraries between PC and MP3 player
• Bulk download photos to a printer or PC
• Send video files from camera or phone to computer or television.

Sounds good to me. Having this easy-to-use, straightforward ability to just connect to any device and transfer information in a fast way, without needing any wireless network or access points, will be great.

Proprietary chargers are supremely annoying, but they’re also an affront to consumers and the environment, according to the European Commission. They want a universal charger, and surprisingly, manufacturers are happy to oblige. UPDATED

The main driving force behind the Commission’s campaign is the reduction of e-waste, which is sensible. After all, a proprietary charger generally dies with its chargee, which seems like a waste. Surprisingly, mobile phone manufacturers appear to be relatively eager to comply. The GSM Association announced today that 17 manufacturers, including Nokia, Motorola and Samsung have agreed on miniMicro-USB as the standard—following a (to date hollow) precedent set by others nearly two years ago.

Micro-USB in mobile phones as been trending up anyway, and seems like a sensible choice. Accordingly, it’s not really surprising to see companies like Samsung and Motorola agree to a standard that they already sometimes use, or for others to switch to a standard that, while it cuts lucrative charger sales, makes things simpler and cheaper in the long run. The real challenge for the commission will be to convince companies like Apple to join in—not they they’ll necessarily have a choice. UPDATE: AFP says the standard in mini USB, but the GSMA press release confirms that it’s micro-usb. [AFP]