Don't expect anything out of a science fiction novel like placeshifting -- better look to the gurus at Sling Media for that -- but if you're just looking for a nice, easy way to peruse your channel guide and set up TiVo recordings remotely from the soft glow of your BlackBerry's screen, there's a new option in town. The aptly-named TiVo for BlackBerry app lets you record one-off shows, set up Season Passes, and browse a guide that looks surprisingly similar to the UI you'll find on the TiVo itself. It's available for download now from App World, and rest assured, you don't need to worry about blowing through your carrier's data caps with this one.

There's a lot of Kumbaya going around in South Korea this morning with the announcement that Samsung and LG -- normally the most bitter of archrivals -- will start working together to develop the next generation of chips for digital TVs and phones. Also being pulled into the love fest is domestic carrier SK Telecom, South Korea's largest, who will be working specifically on designing wireless systems-on-chip for use in handsets. Interestingly, it seems Sammy will be left out of the loop on actual design; that'll be left to LG and others, while Samsung will be responsible for manufacturing and testing the goods. For its part, the government seems to like what it sees here -- it's pumping some 19.5 billion won (about $15.7 million) into the project, though there's no word on when we'll see the fruits of the labor in a retail product.

Everybody's getting into the mobile movie sideload business -- just ask Samsung -- and following an MWC unveiling earlier this year, Sony Ericsson is gearing up to launch movie content starting next month as part of its existing PlayNow Arena service. Direct on-phone downloads over WiFi or 3G would be awesome, but as most of these services tend to operate, PlayNow Arena will require that users select and download movies on their PCs, cable up their phones, and transfer the media the old-fashioned way, at which point they'll be playable on the device for 90 days. You'll be able to select from about 15 movies at any given time with content being cycled monthly -- ridiculously meager, yes, but when you consider that the service is bundled with certain phones (up to 60 movies a year), it's hard to pitch a fit. Look for it to launch on the W995 slider in Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK in June; support for Sony Ericsson's newly-announced Satio and Aino (among others) is expected later in the year.

After what has become one of the longer (and certainly one of the highest-profile) App Store approval delays, SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone has finally gotten Apple's blessing -- with some serious changes under the hood. Most importantly, 3G access has been disabled, meaning you'll only be able to get your Sling on over WiFi -- a serious blow to the app and a huge change from the way SlingPlayer Mobile works on other platforms -- and likely a verification that either Apple or AT&T took serious issue with the bandwidth load imposed by this type of app on the HSPA network. Despite the restriction, Sling will be charging a whopping $29.99 for the download; in exchange for your troubles, though, they've decided to lift the ban on older Slingboxes, with the caveat that they won't be officially supported if you run into trouble.

We've had a chance to play with the app, and it certainly gets the job done -- we just wish it worked a little better. Even on WiFi, control feels laggy, and there's no native guide (though there's an icon to quickly pull up your set-top box's guide). When you're in letterbox mode, you've got black bars around all four sides of the image, meaning that the app isn't taking full advantage of the phone's display; we're hopeful this'll be fixed in a future release, though. Happily, we think Sling really nailed the app's UI -- the on-screen translucent controls are pretty cool and generally work well without obscuring the view. Look to grab your own copy some time between 12:01AM and 6:01AM EDT tomorrow morning, and in the meantime, check out our gallery.

In the 22 city-strong foot race to get a live MPH-based mobile TV network up, running, and available to anyone who wants it, it looks like Washington DC's poised to come out on top. Raleigh has already deployed a handful of transmitters for the benefit of bus-goers, but the Open Mobile Video Coalition has announced that Washington DC's local CBS, PBS, NBC, and Ion affiliates plus a Fox-owned independent will all be ready to roll with MPH transmissions by late summer; of course, what remains to be seen is what sort of hardware will be ready to take advantage of the tech by then. We can likely count AT&T and Verizon out for offering MPH-enabled handsets seeing how they're still trying to figure out how to profit from their MediaFLO-based networks, so T-Mobile and Sprint's decisions to take a wait-and-see approach to the mobile TV phenomenon may really end up working in their favor here. Moving beyond the phones, it's said that Dell will be showing some sort of netbook this week with an integrated MPH tuner at the NAB show in Vegas this week, while Kenwood has in-car solutions in the works. As long as the broadcasts stay free -- which by all accounts they will -- the standard has a fighting chance at relevancy, assuming hardware comes to the table.

Rumor has it that AT&T's gearing up for yet another door-busting, riot-inducing summer filled with new iPhone hardware, which would certainly jibe with everything we've heard in the past few months (never mind the fact that June is officially Apple's iPhone release cycle these days, and indeed, AT&T's apparently saying that the June cycle is becoming "a tradition"). That's not terribly interesting at this point -- what is interesting, though, is how AT&T plans to play it. Apparently, the carrier wants to ramp up its -- ah, how should we put this in a politically correct way -- "integration" with Apple's hardware, including a U-verse app that we're guessing will approximate the functionality to be offered by Verizon's FiOS. What really has us worried is not so much the U-verse app specifically, but the possibility that AT&T's sick and tired of having its crapware left out of its highest-profile device, leading to non-removable garbage like Cellular Video on a future iPhone's home screen. It's still a bit early to sound the alarm there, but you know, we're paranoid types around here. Meanwhile, it sounds like the new device is once again begin said to rock higher 3G speeds than the outgoing model, implying that 7.2Mbps HSDPA to match AT&T's latest infrastructure upgrades is plausible, if not probable. Finally, it's said that a $99 netbook running something other than Windows (don't suppose that'd be Linux?) will be launching this summer, following on the 3G-enabled Aspire One that hit Radio Shack late last year. Heads up, though, AT&T: give us an iPhone with your Mobile Email app on the home screen, and let's just say we can't be held accountable for our actions afterwards. We know you wouldn't do that, but just sayin'.

For phone manufacturers, it seems like having a decent multimedia ecosystem tied to your devices is nearly as important to success these days as the platform you're running, and Samsung wants in on that action -- at least in Europe. The company will launch its Acetrax-powered Samsung Movies service in the UK and Germany first (it's already live in beta form) with more launches elsewhere in Europe down the road, offering 2,000 movies and TV shows from Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal and Momentum Pictures by mid-year starting at £2.49 ($3.60) for a 24-hour rental and £4.99 ($7.22) to buy the goods outright. Sammy is tying the service into its recent and forthcoming OLED launches, implying that the screen tech is the perfect way to enjoy movies on the road. Eventually, the company plans to expand the service to PMPs and connected TVs, but for now, you'll have to struggle along with your Omnia HD, you poor baby, you.

Yeah, sure, name any IR-equipped phone in existence and odds good to excellent that you can find a universal remote app for it, but you probably can't think of many for the iPhone, now, can you? They exist, yes, but they tend to carry a home-automation slant since the lack of an infrared port leaves the thing relegated to WiFi duty. Enter UiRemote, an ambitious little project undertaken by a handful of scrappy University of Toronto students that uses a fingertip-sized IR blaster connected to the headphone jack paired with a totally customizable app to get the job done. Novel? Not necessarily, but when you consider that a dedicated remote with these specs would probably run half a grand, it's an interesting way to save money and still end up with the coolest AV controller on the block. The devs are still tweaking both the module and the app, but hopes are high that they'll be available to all interested parties in the next couple months.

While the BlackBerry camp sits and waits patiently for its public beta to begin in a few days, Sling has been hard at working bringing its SlingPlayer Mobile for Windows Mobile up to snuff for the latest round of devices finding their way into pockets as of late. Notably, the app supports several new resolutions -- 800x480, 640x480, 400x240, and 320x320 -- and a whole host of new phones, including the AT&T Fuze, Sprint / Verizon Touch Pro, and the Samsung Epix, among eleven others. The update is available immediately; should be interesting to see how this looks on an X1 clipping along at WVGA, eh?

Great googly moogly, we wrote about this very application like fifty weeks ago. Fifty, people! Of course, with the drawn-out SlingCatcher drama, lengthy Sling product cycles aren't a terribly big surprise, so we should just all thank our lucky stars we're going to be getting our hands on SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry before the year's out. The app officially enters its public beta cycle come December 30 for the Bold, the Curve 8320 / 8900, the Pearl 8120 / 8220, and the venerable 8820, piping your home teevee right to your handset and usurping any semblance of productivity your BlackBerry otherwise stands for. A 3G or WiFi connection is "strongly recommended" -- which we take to mean "go ahead, give EDGE a whirl" -- but BlackBerry OS 4.5 is a hard and fast requirement, so make sure you come equipped with the goods if you want to waste some quality time in front of the small screen when this goes live.

Seems like the picture's getting clearer by the minute for paid mobile TV content, and it's a pretty bleak picture indeed. Over in Germany, DVB-H subscriptions are dying a slow, painful death (despite a healthy push by the European Union) thanks to free DVB-T content and a lineup of compatible phones to match, and now, Toshiba is shuttering its four-year-old Moba Ho satellite-based service thanks to the overwhelming availability and popularity of one-seg tuners, which like DVB-T in Germany, offer programming at no charge. Technical advantages, and to a large degree, entertainment value both tend to get overlooked when you've got a free product competing against a paid product -- it's frequently a disruptive economic force that takes profit right out of the equation, and Toshiba's learning that lesson the hard way. Keep your chins up, though, guys; at least you lost this battle for an entirely different reason than you did HD DVD, right? Guess that's not helping much. Anyway, expect the service to vaporize by March of next year, with Toshiba planning to take a one-time hit of $232 million for the shutdown.

In the wake of LG's press conference today we're still a little skeptical that the world needs yet another standard for mobile TV, but for what it's worth, the company appears to have signed up a variety of partners in an effort to push it -- and they certainly brought enough eye candy hardware with prototype MPH hardware already integrated. In the mix was a modified VX9400, an LG laptop, a portable media player, and a USB dongle, and with the first commercial rollouts expected as soon as February of next year, we figure it's a good thing they have so much actual product to show. We're a little miffed at the idea that the standard is robbing sweet, sweet bandwidth from the traditional ATSC signal (as opposed to, say, DVB-H and MediaFLO, which rock their own frequencies), but we can also appreciate why this might speed mobile TV rollouts due to a significantly reduced dedicated infrastructure footprint. And besides, who isn't excited about the prospect of watching the boob tube at 140 miles per hour?

Some... er, most parts of the country are waiting on any flavor of that bandwidth-thirsty U-verse IPTV to get switched on, but AT&T's already looking forward to the next big thing. As American mobile carriers get to work on various mobile TV initiatives, AT&T has apparently tapped MobiTV to play a large role in their outreach to the smallest screens; or perhaps "larger role" is a more accurate way of putting it, seeing how Cingular has been offering the California-based company's streaming video service on many of its handsets for over a year now. How exactly the mobile variant of U-verse will work is unclear -- it remains to be seen whether it'll be offered only to subscribers of AT&T's in-home U-verse service or will be launched on a broader scale -- but either way, MobiTV says they'll kick it off by offering their own content and add U-verse content into the mix as time goes on. Details haven't been finalized nor have Hancocks been issued on any contracts yet, but they deal seems as good as sealed given AT&T's and MobiTV's already tight relationship. With Sprint and Verizon having both committed to delivering mobile TV via MediaFLO and T-Mobile testing a variety of technologies, Cingular has remained a bit of an enigma; it feels good to finally have some closure, though we have to shudder a bit at the thought of clogging those sweet HSDPA airwaves with IPTV.

[Via MocoNews]