Why we still can't watch live TV online

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San Francisco, California (CNN) -- What's the difference between the big screen in your living room, the smaller screen on your laptop or the tiny one in your pocket?

Size aside, there's quite a difference, media executives say.

To many, it's a mystery why we can't easily watch online broadcasts of the TV signals that are transmitted by networks over the air, on cable or via satellite.

Even Bryan Perez, the senior vice president for NBA Digital, admits, "It's a challenge to explain."

The simplified answer is that various media companies have a financial stake in where and how an episode of "Mad Men" can be aired. Networks must weigh the tradeoff between sacrificing viewers on one medium for another and also risk straining their lucrative relationships with cable TV companies.

But Time Warner Cable and Comcast are dipping their toes in the internet-video pool. Comcast is testing a new service that brings Web video and social networks onto the TV screen, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

In virtually all of these negotiations, coming to an agreement over streaming live video is no quick task. In addition to the cable and satellite providers, broadcast networks have their own contracts and input, and so do the sports leagues.

Here are some of the reasons why you won't see much live TV online -- yet:

Sports organizations must navigate complex contracts

"It's incredibly tricky," Perez of NBA Digital said at a conference recently. "The place where, I guess, I feel it the most is that the consumer doesn't necessarily understand it."

When not presented with a logical answer from the usual providers, viewers are looking elsewhere -- not unlike when consumers first sought free digital outlets for music (and online piracy) in the early 2000s.

Sports leagues, especially, struggle with internet piracy of their games.

"We spend a lot of time talking to all of our partners. We spend a lot of time negotiating agreements," Perez said, responding onstage to a question from CNN. "There are a lot of times when we're frustrated. ... There are already things that we're doing that weren't even possible with the old agreements."

The National Basketball Association streams few live games but offers a library of dunk highlights and clips.

Major League Baseball also offers free clips, but it has a unique service allowing subscribers to sign up for access to a smattering of live games over the Web. In this new area, finding the right price to charge for live streaming has been a challenge, said Bob Bowman, president and chief executive of MLB Advanced Media.

"We don't know that if we cut the price by half, then we'll double the sales," Bowman said at the same Open Mobile Summit. "We don't believe our high-end-quality content should be free."

Across its networks, MLB gets 10 million visitors per day, and its iPhone app has been downloaded 2 million times, Bowman said.

Broadcasters strive not to 'confuse' viewers

Another sports juggernaut, ESPN, is beginning to lower its shoulder into streaming games.

The network recently launched an on-demand channel for Xbox Live subscribers to access a limited number of live games. It alsorecently struck a deal with Time Warner Cable to allow subscribers to watch ESPN's live sports broadband network over the internet. Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.

ESPN has given a lot of names to its digital products -- ESPN3.com, ESPN Mobile TV, ESPN Everywhere. The partnership with Time Warner is purposely being called, simply, ESPN. That's perhaps an acknowledgement that online access to its channel shouldn't be viewed as different from watching it on a TV set.

"The problem is we're confusing the heck out of consumers with these" service names, said Tim Connolly, mobile vice president for ESPN parent ABC. "We've done a great job of confusing them all."

ABC, which has an iPad app for its flagship programming, is more confident in the packaging model that cable offers than an online subscription or a la carte service, Connolly said at the conference.

"We haven't done any of this discussion -- $10.99 for ESPN per month or whatever," Connolly said. "But we think it's much better to get a mass distribution of cable television."

'Cord cutters'

Most cable executives minimize any trend toward "cord cutting" -- that is, people canceling cable or satellite subscriptions in favor of Web-only entertainment.

Regardless, some TV providers -- including Time Warner and Comcast -- are reporting declines in subscribers.

With new content just a button away, the bundled cable model could foster a better landscape for competition than the a la carte Web model, which forces users to make a separate purchase each time, Connolly said. He used "Mad Men" as an example -- a cable TV hit that seemingly emerged from nowhere courtesy of AMC, which wasn't commonly known for high-quality, original programming.

For sure, the economics of cable is certainly a financially viable one, said Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president of National Public Radio. "A bundled world is always more lucrative because you have control of a distribution outlet," he said.

CNN launched an application for the iPad  on Tuesday, which lets users watch live video on the device, but only during breaking-news events.

Wilson, a longtime newsman, compared the obstacles facing TV companies in the internet age to the recent tidal wave that has upended the newspaper industry.

"Because the internet tends to unbundle everything, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight that tide," he said.




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3D trees in Google Earth

Google Earth is about to get something of a makeover thanks to more than 80 million 3D trees populating the product.

"Trees are part of the world we live in and if you fly over San Francisco with the trees turned on versus turned off it presents a different sense of what the city looks like," said Google Earth's vice president of product, the aptly-named Mr Birch.

He added that planting more than 80 million trees presented some technical challenges: working out where to put them; ensuring they were of the right type for the area and making them distinct enough to determine one species from another.

To start, six major cities have been populated with more than 60 different species: Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo are now home to models of dozens of species from the Japanese Maple and the East African Cordia to the cacao tree and the flowering dogwood.

         Google Earth also gets a bit political as Mr Birch explained that they have started to model forest lands and areas of the world under threat such as the Amazon and Kenya and some of the work being done to restore the environment there.

The search giant worked with groups like the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and Conabio in Mexico.

"We want to tell a broader story of the trees and deforestation and climate change to draw attention to the things happening to our planet," he said.

"This brings home just how special trees are and how they need to be protected," added Raleigh Seamster from Google Earth's outreach team.

"Modelling these areas of deforestation will draw more attention to what is going on there."

Street View also gets woven more tightly into the offer. Yes, that same product that has been slightly tarnished of late with issues of collecting snippets of data it shouldn't haveas the cars drove by people's homes to snap photos of neighbourhoods.

"Our goal is to really create this mirror world where people can travel to distant lands and learn about the planet and different areas. One of the problems is that the experience doesn't connect you all the way to the ground," said Mr Birch.

"It does a great job flying over mountains and cityscapes and your old childhood neighbourhood. But we all live on the ground and walk about the street and that is how we experience the Earth and this tighter integration with Street View gives us a great opportunity to complete the connection between the street level and this flying around."

The final change is an effort to make it easier to find out what historical images are available for a given area.

The upgrade was included in the previous release; this version invites users to fly to an area where historical imagery is available and see the date of the oldest images on a status bar at the bottom of the screen from London during the Blitz to Port-au-Prince inHaiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010.

Multiple Gmail accounts just got a lot easier to manage

   

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• E-mail delegation will allow you to easily manage multiple Gmail accounts
• Originally feature was useful for granting others access to your primary Gmail account
• When you send e-mails from secondary account, primary address will also appear

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• Google Gmail
• Email Software

Google's announced yet another awesome Gmail feature today. Called e-mail delegation, the feature will allow you to easily manage multiple Gmail accounts without signing in and out of Gmail and switching accounts manually.

Originally, e-mail delegation was useful for granting others access to your primary Gmail account -- personal assistants, for example.

With today's changes, this basic feature is going to be more useful for any Gmail user with multiple accounts of his or her own.

When you sign into your primary Gmail account, you can choose to grant access to another account. Just navigate to your Gmail settings by clicking the link in the top right corner of Gmail's web interface.

Under the Accounts tab, there's now a new section entitled, "Grant access to your account." Here, you can add any other Gmail accounts you control to your primary Gmail account.

When you add an account, you'll have to accept access from a verification e-mail sent to the to-be-added account. Once the account is successfully added, you can simply toggle between your Gmail accounts without logging in and out.

Also, when you send a new e-mail message while signed into a secondary account, your primary address will also appear in the e-mail details.

Online WikiLeaks game is a hit

       

A computer-game parody of the much-talked-about WikiLeaks saga has made a splash online.

In the online game, players assume the role of WikiLeaks founder and outsized personality Julian Assange hiding behind President Obama's desk in the Oval Office.

Using their mouse, players must manipulate the Assange character to smuggle secret documents from Obama's laptop onto a USB drive as the president dozes off. Those who fail are treated to a juicy presidential sound bite and a mock story planted in the newspaper.

More than a million people have visited the website for "WikiLeaks: The Game" since it was posted five days ago, developer Sebastiaan Moeys, 21, told ABC News.

"Just like governmental attempts to quash WikiLeaks, the game is harder than it looks," wrote Alexia Tsotsis on the tech-news blog TechCrunch. "I've played it five times and I still haven't won."

Game developers have been quick in recent years to capitalize on the popularity of prominent news events.

Satirical animated games have spoofed Tiger Woods' extramarital scandal, the Hudson River plane landing, the Chilean mine rescueand the rescue of a ship captain from Somali pirates.

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Long 'Harry Potter' movie clip leaked online

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an't wait until Friday to check out the latest installment of the "Harry Potter" film series? Well, if you have any knowledge of torrent sites at all, you should be able to view the first 36 minutes today, as a goodly chunk of the film has leaked online.
The leak comes one day after the New York City premiere of the film.
According to TorrentFreak, the beginning of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (the first installment of the two-part finale) is currently available on dozens of torrent sites. A quick search by the staff of Mashable proved this to be true.
This news is sure to cause a frenzy among Potter fans -- TorrentFreak reports that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" scored a spot on its "most pirated movies" list with nearly 8 million downloads last year.
The book version of "Deathly Hallows" also leaked -- back in 2007.
So why is the cinematic leak only 36 minutes long? TorrentFreak postulates that Warner Bros. Pictures feared a leak, so it limited the time of the screeners to ensure that the whole film didn't make it to the web.
Seeing as how the clip has hit the internet mere days before the premiere, we doubt it will have a negative effect on box office sales come Friday -- unless, of course, those first 36 minutes are irrevocably horrible.
The last time we saw a leak of this magnitude was probably that of "Wolverine," which leaked a month early last year yet was still a box office success.

What effect do you think the "Potter" leak will have on opening night?

Intel raises its dividend

By Aaron Smith, staff writerNovember 12, 2010: 10:17 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Intel Corp. announced Friday that it is raising its dividend by 15%, joining the ranks of other technology giants that have beefed up dividend activity.
Intel said the increase pushes its quarterly cash dividend up to 18 cents per share, or 72 cents per share on an annual basis.

"Our ongoing operational performance and confidence in our business going forward provide the ability to return more cash to shareholders," Chief Executive Paul Otellini said, referring to 2010 as Intel's "best year ever."
The move boosts the chipmaker's dividend yield to 3.4%, based on the company's Thursday closing price of $21.21 per share. That exceeds the yields offered by bonds such as the 10-year note, which was at 2.7% on Friday.
The company has been paying a cash dividend since 1992, and said it has already doled out $2.6 billion in dividends in the first three quarters of this year.
Intel's (INTC, Fortune 500) stock rose more than 2% on the news.
This is the latest example of a ramp-up in dividend activity as corporations look for ways to generate shareholder returns on their fattened wallets.
Intel is following in the footsteps of Microsoft Corp (MSFT, Fortune 500)., which ramped up its dividend in September for the first time in two years. The software company increased its quarterly dividend by 3 cents to 16 cents per share.

GOOG-411 shuts down, but there's an alternative

                                                                                                                                              Google's 411 service will shut down for good on Friday, but that doesn't mean the end of free calls to business numbers.

Launched in 2007, GOOG-411 was a free voice recognition search service for business listings drawn from the Google Local directory. You'd dial 800-GOOG-411 (or 877-GOOG-411), speak a search request (business name or category) into your phone, and Google would list results in audio.

When you selected a result, Google would place the call -- which meant if the number was long-distance, the call would be free to you.

According to PhoneNews, some cost-conscious callers would call GOOG-411 to place free calls to business numbers -- using it like a "friends and family number." I found this especially useful when calling tech support or customer service numbers -- which often, surprisingly, aren't toll-free.

But, even without the Google service, there's still another way to get around charges for calls to business numbers.

Microsoft's Bing suite of search tools offers a nearly identical service, called Bing 411. According to this audio demo, it works almost like placing a normal 411 call through your phone company -- only without the hefty charges most phone companies levy for this service.

PhoneNews notes it takes 24 hours to update friends-and-family numbers with your phone provider, so this service is useful when you unexpectedly need to call a long-distance business number

RockMelt browser is social, but not obnoxiously so

Is it worth switching to a new browser? Marc Andreessen never had to force users to ask that question when he built Mosaic in 1993. For most early adopters, it was their first browser.
But now he's backing the development of another browser, RockMelt. This browser is not perfect, but it does show that there's room yet in the market. If Facebook built a browser, it would probably look a lot like this.
This has been tried before. The other social Web browser, Flock, integrates Facebook features. Also, like Flock (at least the new 3.0 version), RockMelt is built from Chromium, the same Google-developed open toolkit underneath the Chrome browser.
RockMelt is solid effort and is worth trying. Here are some reasons you will probably like it; and, to be fair, some things that may turn you off:

RockMelt is called the "Facebook browser" for a good reason. It gives you two dashboard wings: the left-hand wing shows you which Facebook friends are online; the right lets you drill into your social services, RSS feeds, and plug-ins.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

RockMelt browser integrates social features, gracefully (images)

Why you'll like it

It's a real social browser
RockMelt shows which of your friends are online on Facebook, right in your browser. If you want to share something from the Web, you'll know who's going to see it right away. It makes sharing links and pages more engaging than using Twitter or even Facebook's site. (Downside: you can't scroll the left-hand "Facebar," which is sorted alphabetically, so unless you filter your friends by your RockMelt favorites, you'll always see your "A" friends on your list but you may never see your "Zs.")

Yet the social aspect is not overwhelming
RockMelt puts your friends in a narrow bar on the left, and status badges for sites (Facebook and Twitter, plus RSS feeds and plug-ins) in a skinny bar along the right. On wide-screen and large monitors, these dashboards are at once informative and unobtrusive. The design works. Flock's social sidebar has the cool feature of pulling status updates from all your social networks into one stream, but it's more in your face than RockMelt's.
Sharing is fun and easy. So is updating
There's a "share" button near the URL entry field. You can share pages to Facebook or Twitter easily and intuitively. The same button lets you send links as private messages directly to specific Facebook users (but not as direct messages to Twitter friends.)
If this were a Facebook browser, by the way, it'd probably say "Like" instead on the Share button. Look for that change when Facebook buys out this company.
You can also send out Facebook and Twitter status updates without sharing anything. It's equally easy and fast, although the status update button is in a different part of the browser frame.
It has a really slick search function
RockMelt breaks with Chrome's single URL and search box concept and gives you an old-fashioned search field alongside, just like ye olde Firefox. When you search in the RockMelt field, you get a drop-down window with results that pre-cache into the background. As you cursor down the list, the page behind the window updates fast. Power browsers will appreciate a tiny but wonderful "add as tab" button in each result in the search window that opens a result in a new tab without changing your focus to it. Got a lot of results you want to visit later? Click, click, click. They're loaded into tabs that you can get to at your leisure.
You can still search in the URL field, as with Chrome, but RockMelt's search is better.
It's fast like Chrome
Although it appears to be a bit of a process hog, RockMelt is fast. There's no speed penalty for the social features.
It does RSS better than any other browser
If you're on a site with an RSS feed, a little icon lights up to let you know it. It's a snap to subscribe to the feed and add a site icon into your right-hand sidebar. RSS results display in a scrolling window, with previews. The RSS preview window doesn't have the same functionality as the search results window, however.
The beta has a great invitation system
During the beta period, when you go to the RockMelt site, you're asked to sign in with Facebook. If you request an invitation, your Facebook friends who are on RockMelt will see that you're awaiting access when they open up their browser. Any one of them can then hook you up. As a pal on Twitter said, "It makes the inviter and invitee feel special."

Still feels like a beta

RockMelt is still beta and it feels like it. Things you might want to think about before you dive in include the security and privacy issues of hitching a Facebook app so tightly to your browsing history. Also, RockMelt is not based on the most recent or safest build of Chromium.
It also looks like some of RockMelt's cloud-based services are overwhelmed at the moment. My social sidebars wouldn't load into RockMelt on a Windows machine after a restart of the browser, and the invitation system wouldn't find all my friends when I wanted it to.
And while Chrome plug-ins will load into RockMelt, I found some that didn't display their content correctly. RockMelt also needs a few more networking services layered into it (like LinkedIn, perhaps, or Gmail). But Facebook and Twitter are good starting points.
I don't know if I'll still be using RockMelt next week, but assuming the bugs get squashed in the product and that the company can reassure users about privacy, I can't see strong reasons to avoid this browser. It's fast, it's got a really great search feature, and while it is a social browser, it's subtle about it. It's well worth taking for a spin.