What do you think? Do stratospheric HD channel counts matter to you, or are 50-odd HD channels enough? Is your cable provider delivering enough high-def, or are you considering a switch to satellite or Fios TV?

Feel free to argue with our methods in the comments section below, but the goal is to even the playing field and call the various providers on their inflationary channel accounting. It’s also sadly true that many so-called HD networks don’t actually carry much HD content–but they have the potential to, and will probably carry more actual high-def going forward.

Second, availability is local-within-local. Just because Fios is available, according to the Web site, in the Manhattan zip code of 10013, doesn’t mean you can actually get it in your building. The build-out and availability of Fios will take years in New York City, as it has in other parts of the country. The same goes for satellite, of course; many buildings don’t allow dishes, for example. Also, perhaps because Fios is available in Queens and Brooklyn more widely, Time Warner Cable offers more HD channels in those boroughs than in Manhattan, so we used the TWC channel count for Brooklyn and Queens, not Manhattan.

The key here is our definition of “national and local.” The big three all tout HD channel counts near or above the nice round number of 100 in their advertising campaigns, and by our count of “total channels,” they all come more or less close enough, but we took a closer look at the channels themselves, and broke down national and local channels we consider important. That includes local broadcast channels like PBS (which neither satellite service offers), ABC and Fox, premium movie channels like HBO and Max (formerly Cinemax), and the myriad niche channels from ESPN to Mav TV to Palladia to World Fishing Network. We specifically exclude
Regional Sports Networks, exclusive channels like Voom (which is only available on NY-area provider Cablevision), and duplicate feeds of premium movie channels, such as HBO (east) and HBO (west) carried by DirecTV and Fios.

First off, your local cable service will likely have different HD channel lineups–in the case of TWC and Cablevision, you’re likely to have fewer HD channels than we enjoy in the NYC area. Right now CNET just doesn’t have the resources to collate all of the cable services nationwide for comparison in a big chart.

(Credit:
Verizon)

We just finished a major update of our popular chart of HD programming compared and the new winner, in terms of national and local HD channels, by our count, is Fios TV. Bringing a hefty 83 such channels to bear in the New York City area, the fiber-optic-based TV service from Verizon comes out ahead of perennial satellite champions DirecTV (67 channels) and Dish Network (68) as of today.

That’s a lot of caveats, but at the end of the day, we still think it’s valuable to provide a snapshot of the true state of the HD channel-quantity race as it stands today. Expect more updates to the chart as the providers roll out additional channels in the coming months. Thanks to Matthew Panton for heavy lifting on the chart updates.

Note: CNET is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBS.

Our chart is necessarily local. We compare the HD channel lineups available near the CNET New York offices from the aforementioned big three, along with cable providers Cablevision (Long Island), Comcast (New Jersey) and Time Warner Cable (Brooklyn and Queens). That leads to some important points.

But it don't check out. Yet.

If you’re curious to see what Fire Eagle can offer, though, ignore today’s news about it. Fire Eagle itself does not, yet, have a useful interface. But since it’s now open to developers, we should see cool apps soon. We heard this morning that Dopplr will have Fire Eagle integration shortly, and that the Bug Labs geolocation module will support the API. We’ll report on these new applications when they show up for trials. Update: Dopplr has implemented the link to Fire Eagle. Very cool.

Your location checks in…

Read also:
TechCrunch: Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location” Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality.

ReadWriteWeb: Location Aware: Smart Rollout for Yahoo! Fire Eagle.

Fire Eagle, as we’ve written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it’s an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).

At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo’s geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product’s private beta.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

Goom Radio, which entered public alpha testing yesterday, claims to be trying to change the landscape of online radio. One big difference between Goom and other radio services is a radio widget that users will be able to embed in social-networking sites and other Web pages. Goom also makes a big deal about its audio technology, which starts with uncompressed WAV files instead of digitally compressed MP3 or Windows Media files, and then runs them through various boosters and filters equalizers tailored to each genre–sort of how traditional radio stations do it today. Eventually, users will be able to create their own radio stations (and I’ll blog about it again when this feature’s available), but today it’s limited to a handful of professionally curated stations in particular genres.

In our conversation yesterday, Goom CEO Rob Williams emphasized that the company is seeking out the right kind of DJs–folks who truly care about music, and are as bored and fed up with the research-driven pap on mainstream radio as most other hardcore music fans are. Still–a DJ is a DJ, and most of the folks on the station so far come out of the traditional music industry. As a result, the stations on Goom radio today are cool–there’s an Eels song playing on the indie-rock Tastemaker station as I write this–but not particularly cutting-edge or risky. This is the music that the pros think you should hear.

Contrast this with another service that launched last week, MTT Radio. MTT stands for Music Think Tank, and it’s a relatively new blog and service for indie musicians, staffed and owned by people with ample experience catering to that market. Written content on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons license, and would-be contributors are encouraged to post for the MTT Open site, which is open to all writers. Think of it like a Huffington Post for indie musicians. MTT Radio works the same way as the Open blog site: anybody can contribute a song, and they’re listed in reverse-chronological order and indexed by genre.

The two services aren’t exactly comparable: Goom is a profit-driven business intended to reach as many people as possible, while MTT Radio is an experimental way for indie musicians to get exposure on the site. Still, the contrast made me think about how online radio is going to evolve. In a world of MP3 players and on-demand streaming services like Spotify, where users are accustomed to controlling every song that plays, and services like Pandora, which create customized radio stations for every taste, I don’t know if a DJ-driven online radio station has much appeal. One-to-many, broadcast, top-down: no matter who’s driving it, this kind of radio already seems outdated. A service like MTT (or, for that matter, MySpace), where anybody can post their music for the world to hear, seems like a more modern approach.

(Credit: MTT Radio)

He was interviewed on stage by Dmitry Shapiro, founder of Veoh Networks, the online video site in which Eisner is an investor. And Eisner affirmed to the advertisers and marketers present that despite its reputation as a cesspool of dogs on skateboards and cats on treadmills, new media isn’t all that new. “(Online video) has different dynamics in the technology, but it doesn’t have different dynamics in the terms of story. The same rules from cavemen to obviously the Greeks and Shakespeare…the idea of the story as we all learn in high school English and theater, those really will prevail in new media.”

NEW YORK–As head of Web video studio Vuguru, longtime entertainment exec Michael Eisner has been on a sort of tent-revival tour for the past few years, preaching the gospel of Internet video. On Thursday, his audience was the ad industry, and he was there to tell them not to be fazed by disappointing revenues on Web video.

“I’m seeding what I think will be a future business,” Eisner explained. He’s been vocal in admitting that online video isn’t a profitable business yet. But it will be, he emphasized, and he wanted to position himself to be first in line when the money starts rolling in. “You have an option when you leave 40 years of a public company. You can continue being a dyspeptic, aging, wheelchaired, drooling, irrelevant executive, or you can put the word ‘new’ next to you.”

Eisner was speaking at the Digital Content Newfront, ad group Digitas’ take on the traditional television upfront event. The event, part of Internet Week New York, showcased online video content companies like 60 Frames, MySpaceTV, MTV New Media, Generate, Next New Networks, and Eisner’s own Vuguru. In the audience were loads of ad-industry types; Eisner’s goal was to convince them that video on the Web is worth the investment.

Vuguru debuted in 2007 with Prom Queen, a scripted series syndicated on MySpaceTV, YouTube, Veoh, and a whole host of other platforms. Eisner has been open about the fact that financially, it was not a success. But he’s kept going, with several new Veoh series including the Monkees-like The All-For-Nots, and a new comedy series centered on classic trading card brand Topps, which Eisner acquired. Called Back On Topps, it cast two comedians as fictional heirs to the Topps fortune and chronicles their run-ins with famous sports stars.

“The advertisers are recognizing how big the audience can be. My interest is getting in there before they explode.” –Michael Eisner

Eisner reiterated that big shifts in media historically don’t rake in money at first. He compared the rise of online video to cable television versus broadcast: “The highest-quality programming is now on cable,” he said, adding that basic cable is “no longer an ancillary market or a rerun market. The dollars are enough that it’s a primary market.”

He also suggested that advertisers could build particularly creative advertising campaigns that tie specifically into the shows they’re placed with, finding a middle ground between product placement and traditional commercials. “The commercials that I believe could follow (videos) as long as they’re short, ten seconds…somehow had the ambiance of the same environment, the same story. The audience would get the point that the brand was somehow involved in the creative process,” he described. “So that would be not product integration and not a straight dropping-in of a ten-second spot, but a sensitivity to the environment. That’s something that’s never been done before.”

He couldn’t stress enough that advertisers should gear up and get ready to make big investments in the field. “It’s just beginning to happen. We now call ‘new media’ obviously broadband, Internet, whatever, but there was a time that new media was home video. There was a time that new media was TV. There was a time that new media was motion pictures in the nickelodeon theater.”

Michael Eisner

Creating promotional series is one option for brands to make a few bucks off online video, Eisner explained. So is sponsorship. “Almost everybody working inside is nervous that you’re going to damage the brand,” he warned. “You have to take risks, and you have to know the line which you cannot go over.”

Eisner took a moment to ask Shapiro about what’s next at Veoh, which just raised another round of venture funding. “I think the key is discovery,” Shapiro replied. “In a world of 400 cable channels it’s hard to find something good to watch. In a world of a million shows it’s practically impossible.”

The Iriver P7 has a stunning design, inside and out, but looks aren't everything.

Iriver’s latest portable video player, the P7, has plenty going for it: big screen, low price, and a stylish design. From the moment we pried its aluminum frame from the package, we were certain this thing was going to be a slam dunk. We were wrong.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Iriver P7 photos

While the P7’s design feels like a million bucks, internally, the sluggish touch screen, jerky menus, and surprisingly limited video flexibility show the P7 for the $169 player that it is. We’re also living at a time where there are a number of video-worthy options in the $200 PVP space, with products like the Cowon O2 or the oldie-but-goodie Archos 605 WiFi offering better bang for the buck.

Still, it’s refreshing to see a manufacturer like Iriver prove that design quality and affordability aren’t mutually exclusive. I can’t tell you how many all-plastic products land on my desk that feel like they just rolled out of a gumball machine. The P7 is one of the prettiest looking and exquisitely built portable media players I’ve reviewed since the
iPod Touch–but appearances only get you so far.

(Credit:
PicWash)

PicWash plans to expand its online photo-retouching service.

LAS VEGAS–PicWash, a Web site that offers to retouch photos for $7 and up, has plans to offer premium services in coming months.

Among those new options: getting rid of braces, getting rid of double chins, and slimming bodies down. Of this latter category, Ciraldo hopes people will use the service as “slimspiration”–giving themselves a vision of what they could become if they lost some pounds.

Coming later–probably March–will be a variety of premium services that will cost up to $30, Ciraldo said here at Photo Marketing Association trade show.

The company promises a 48-hour turnaround for its current services.

Take, for example, its commitment to help teenagers understand the importance of respecting intellectual property (read: giving Microsoft more money). It just put out a survey showing that when kids understand the rules of copyright, they’re “less likely to download illegally.”

It also created a cute website that shows kids just how much fun it is to respect intellectual property. Hurray! That’s where I’m going to be hanging out on Friday night.

commentary

You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft. It’s in it for the looonnnngggg haul.

Perhaps the kids have something to teach Microsoft here. Google doesn’t seem to have the same problems Microsoft is allegedly having. That’s because it’s a 21st-century company. Perhaps Microsoft should consider joining the 21st Century.

Robot combat and soccer have so far been the chosen sports for robots. Going for putting a golf ball required the roboticist to implement a slightly different type of skill set for the robot. Demonstrating that this skill set is achievable could be a point of inspiration for others in the field.

(Credit:
Crabfu.com)

Will the next PGA champ need batteries?

The Putter Bot is a remote-controlled robot that can putt a golf ball. Huang has made a video (below) that shows it off quite well.

While the Putter Bot may just seem like another neat novelty, it could actually change robotics competitions.

I-Wei Huang, the same robot creator from Taiwan who won Best in Show in the 2008 RoboGames for his Swashbot, has another nifty little robot to show off.

Like two teenagers trying to figure out if they like each other, Yahoo and Microsoft are back at it again, trying to determine if a relationship can work. In Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I spoke with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried about this latest round of talks and who is more desperate for the partnership.

(Credit:
Newegg)

CNET hasn’t reviewed the suite, but four users spoke up about it on the product page. As with most security suites, some loved it, others hated it. If you don’t mind waiting to get your money back and do want hardcore protection against the horrors of the Internet, you can’t beat free. The rebate deal [PDF] expires Aug. 16.

Get this 3-user security suite free after rebate.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Security software: necessary evil or just evil? I tend to think it’s the latter, though many would argue it’s very necessary and not evil at all. If you fall into that camp (or know a tech doofus who does), check out this deal from Newegg: Panda Internet Security 2008 (3-user edition) shipped to your door for zero dollars. Well, actually, for $40, but you get it back in rebate form.