Xbox 360 getting IPTV November 7 - Report

At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft announced with great fanfare that the Xbox 360 would get IPTV, in a partnership with AT&T. Now, nearly four years later, it appears the console will finally be getting the functionality, according to a report on Engadget.

Citing several leaked slides and screenshots, the tech blog is reporting that starting November 7 Xbox 360 owners will be able to use their consoles as set-top boxes for AT&T's U-Verse IPTV service.

There is a catch, however--two catches, to be exact. Engadget's sources say that to use the service, there must be at least one DVR already in the home and activated to the service, which can provide up to four streams of HD video. Also, only Xbox 360s with hard drives will support U-Verse.

The addition of IPTV will come on the heels of the fall Xbox Live update, which will go live sometime before November 4. Features included in the update are Netflix search, ESPN 3 TV, and more lifelike avatars. The new avatars will be redesigned to better mesh with the Kinect motion-sensing system, which also goes on sale on November 4 for $150.

AMC's 'Rubicon' takes a brainier approach

By Gary Levin, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Rubicon is crossing over as AMC's newest series, a conspiracy thriller set in New York about a team of dedicated intelligence analysts.

The series, a throwback to the early 1970s era of paranoia-fueled drama (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), centers on the American Policy Institute, a government front charged with sifting through data gathered from intelligence agencies about potential threats.

After a mysterious suicide early in Sunday's premiere (8 ET/PT), Will Travers (James Badge Dale) is promoted to team leader of his unit, which seeks patterns in seemingly mundane details.

But he's also investigating a broader conspiracy that raises questions about his employer and his mission. And Travers is weighed down by the death of his wife and daughter on 9/11. "He had a happy, healthy life. He was a college professor, had a beautiful wife and child, and then — catastrophe," Dale says.

Executive producer Henry Bromell (Homicide, Brotherhood) took over the project from creator Jason Horwitch (The Pentagon Papers) and brought his own background to bear. His dad is a retired 30-year CIA veteran who toted his family around Middle East hotspots. (Bromell wrote a fictional account of his childhood, the 2002 novel Little America.)

Dale co-starred in HBO's The Pacific but is familiar to fans of Fox's just-canceled 24 as Agent Chase Edmunds, who had his shackled hand chopped off to contain a deadly virus in the third season.

"We take our time here," he says during a break between scenes. "We're not blowing things up. The danger here is in the quiet moments, the idea that somebody's watching you at all times."

Rubicon is a cerebral version of the conspiracy thriller. Early episodes are light on chases and gunplay, and instead focus on parsing clues to both API's missions and the wider conspiracy. And like those earlier movies, the series takes a decidedly low-tech approach in which analysts sift through piles of documents.

"We've had some cop shows in which guys sneak around alleys, but never had one about brainy guys who sort through reams of data and try to find patterns," Bromell says. "They're afraid if they screw up, there will be another 9/11, so the burnout rate is high. It's really hard to let your sense of responsibility go."

Dale, Bromell says, is "wonderfully convincing as an intellectual. The character has to be very verbal because he's very smart. On the other hand, by inclination he's not a man of many words."

Rubicon is the third regular series in AMC's renaissance, following Breaking Bad and Mad Men, which it precedes on Sundays. But Bad was developed at FX, while Mad was famously first rejected by HBO; Rubicon is homegrown, dreamed up by the network's programmers.

Resolution to the conspiracy is promised in the first 13 episodes. "By the end of the first season, the viewer will know 90% of what's behind everything, but that's going to flip into something else," Bromell says. "So it's not like it's over."

Says Dale, "There comes a breaking point," a reference to the title, a river in Italy crossed by Julius Caesar that marks a point of no return. "Will makes a decision that affects everything."

As Travers engages in a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers late in the season, he hides out with a neighbor (Annie Parisse) in scenes being filmed here. Dale, who began to question his character's sanity, had to take a few days off, Bromell says: "He was starting to doubt everything in his brain" about the show's plot.

All this surveillance, Dale says, makes him nervous. "I started looking over my shoulder since we started filming."

Hulu headed to a Xbox 360 dashboard near you?

courtesy of engadget

From its humble origins as a chunky black box of PC parts, the Xbox has grown into a strapping young adult -- attracting a social circle including Netflix, Facebook and Twitter. Now, rumor has it that the Xbox 360's preening for a date with Hulu, too. Though plans aren't set in stone, Gear Live tells us Hulu has been spotted in internal Xbox 360 dashboard builds, and that Microsoft will introduce the streaming video service as part of their Xbox LIVE experience at E3 2010. The publication is mighty certain here, but at this point we can't corroborate for ourselves. If this does end up happening, the question is how much it might cost, as we hear there's going to be some sort of fee -- perhaps Hulu will be part of that "Xbox LIVE Platinum Tier" rumor that gets dragged out most every year.

LOST: The Point and Click 3d Adventure Game

Lost: The Game (8-bit Version)

LOST Creator Tweets Fan Made Finale Trailer

LOST gets a Scooby Doo Resolution

LOST: Those Meddling Castaways

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Spoofs | Funny Animations

3 Alternate Endings to "Lost" to Air on Kimmel

ABC has announced that as part of the "Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to Lost" special, the network will show three alternate endings:

Following the final episode of "Lost," Jimmy Kimmel will host a one-hour post-show discussion and celebration of the beloved series, SUNDAY, MAY 23 at 12:05 a.m., ET on ABC, following local news.

Kimmel will be joined in studio by Naveen Andrews, Nestor Carbonell, Alan Dale, Jeremy Davies, Emilie de Ravin, Michael Emerson, Matthew Fox, Daniel Dae Kim, Terry O'Quinn and Harold Perrineau, with special appearances by Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway and Evangeline Lilly and an exclusive look at THREE ALTERNATIVE FINAL SCENES from the minds of executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

Jimmy Kimmel Live has been deluged by more studio audience ticket requests for this special than any show in its seven-plus year history. Watch the grand finale to the grand finale on "Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to Lost."

The "Lost" finale will air from 9 - 11:30 p.m. on May 23rd.

The 'LOST' Supper

A shaken nation is soothed; 'Lost' won't be pre-empted

courtesy of MercuryNews.com

The first episode of the final season of "Lost" will spew forth new layers of confusion and complexity (It was all a dream!) right on time after all, with the White House seeking to calm a jittery nation by announcing that the president will not interrupt the long-awaited episode by giving some sort of national address the same night.
Fear ran rampant when it was announced that President Barack Obama wanted to push back the annual State of the Union address — typically held in late January — to February 2, which as everyone knows is the season premiere of "Lost."
Impeachment papers were readied.
But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs assured viewers Friday that he "doesn't foresee a scenario in which millions of people that hope to finally get some conclusion in 'Lost' are pre-empted by the president."
The "Lost" news came in response to a question from ABC correspondent Ann Compton at the afternoon press briefing.
The time slot for "Lost" may be secured, but still no word on what day the president will deliver the State of the Union. Super Bowl Sunday, perhaps?

New Series 'FlashForward' Will be Similar to 'LOST'

courtesy of SciFiWire

Early buzz has already called ABC's new series FlashForward the new Lost—probably because the network loses that hit series after next season—but the show's creators embrace the comparison.

Speaking to the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, Calif., today, co-creator and executive producer David S. Goyer said that Lost gave him the confidence to bring FlashForward to ABC, even though he began developing it as a spec script (originally for HBO) prior to 2004.

"I'm an enormous fan of Lost, because I just thought it was a genre-breaking, bold show," Goyer said in a press conference. "It proved to me that [on] network television, there could be a place for a show like that. Once I started talking to [Lost co-creator] Damon [Lindelof] even more, and he was saying how supportive ABC had been, I became convinced it was the right home. By the way, we'd be happy with half the rabid fan base of that show."

In FlashForward, based on Robert J. Sawyer's SF novel, every person in the world blacks out for 2 minutes 17 seconds, during which time everyone has a vision of the future—April 29, 2010, to be specific— and the show's characters, notably FBI agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), begin to piece together what happened. Goyer said that the show is built so that about one-third of the characters are eager for the future, a third will dread what may be in store and a third are neutral about it.

During the press conference, which included new cast member Dominic Monaghan (who is not in the pilot), Goyer revealed that Alex Kingston's character will return and that Gabrielle Union will be a cast member (playing the fiancee of John Cho's FBI agent character, Demetri Noh) and that a kangaroo glimpsed in the pilot episode will appear again as a leitmotif (kind of like Lost's polar bear?).

"Lost taught me you can do a show with a large ensemble cast," Goyer continued. "You can tell a big cinematic story, and Lost traffics a lot in shades of gray, different shades of morality, which is something I find really interesting. We're huge fans of TV. Whenever we're breaking story with [executive producer] Mark [Guggenheim], we approach it as if we were watching a television show. What would we like to see?"

As the master of a new mythology, Goyer and company take their responsibility seriously. "I feel as a viewer I really like to feel the storytellers know where they're going," Goyer said. "We have an enormous obligation with a show like this, where we state this claim: April 29, we constantly talk about the obligation we have to really figure it out and know where we're going."

Part of the plan is that viewers will see the events of the future on April 29 by the end of season one, Guggenheim said. "The answer is yes," Guggenheim said. "By the end of the first season, we will get to April 29, 2010. That's not necessarily the season finale, but we will definitely get up to the future."

Goyer added, "April 29 is a Thursday when we're airing, conveniently enough. Somebody actually did look at a calendar."

Perhaps the only mystery FlashForward plans to hold back is just what caused the flash-forward blackouts. "By the end of the first season, most of the questions raised in the pilot—including the one you see at the very end [of the pilot]—will be answered," Goyer said. "The over-arcing sort of cause of why the blackout happened, that's our background-radiation mystery of the whole series. I think to really do the show justice, we would need at least three seasons."

The series is only loosely based on Sawyer's book, with different characters, setting and time frame. But one character imported from the book is Lloyd Simcoe, played by Jack Davenport. Goyer said the book won't provide much in the way of clues about the show's version of Simcoe.

"He's a version of that character," Goyer said. "The book obviously jumps 21 years in the future and concerns a group of particle physicists at CERN. We thought if we led with that, it's a group of wacky particle physicists at CERN. We met with Robert Sawyer, who completely grasped that in order to make a TV show, we took the premise, truncated it and provided more points of entry. Robert liked it, and he's going to write an episode for us the first season."

The pilot features an epic freeway accident that occurs during the blackout. That was all shot practically, Goyer said. "All real freeways," Goyer said. "We shut down the 110 freeway [in Los Angeles]. That was awesome. I had a lot of friends texting me saying, 'Is that you shutting us down? Thanks.' We shut it down intermittently for three days. It was cool."

'Heroes' is getting desperate for Viewers

courtesy of examiner.com

Hayden Panettiere going gay on 'Heroes'

Several overseas media outlets are reporting that Hayden Panettiere's character Claire Bennett (the Cheerleader) on NBC's Heroes will go gay next season.

A source told the UK's Daily Star that Claire will share a same-sex kiss with her college roommate. “It’s just girly fun at first. But it might progress into a more serious relationship. It depends on how viewers respond."

The 19 year-old actress dated her Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia (Peter) in real life for several months, but the two allegedly had a nasty break-up that made working together on set difficult.

The show could certainly use some help after two lackluster seasons and plummeting ratings. If you want to see a hot lesbian relationship on network TV, make sure to tune in to Heroes and send the producers your messages of support!

"Human Target" Comic coming to TV

via comicbookmovie

Fox has given early series orders to the comicbook drama "Human Target." The network wouldn't officially confirm the pickups, as execs want to hold off until Monday's upfront before making any series announcements. But insiders confirmed the orders Tuesday afternoon of "Human Target" and "Sons of Tucson."

The shows join animated "Family Guy" spinoff "Cleveland" and music-themed drama "Glee" -- which gets an early premiere on the net this month -- as Fox's new fall shows picked up so far.

"Human Target," from Warner Bros. TV, Wonderland and DC Comics, revolves around a man who assumes the identity of people in danger. Jon Steinberg wrote the pilot and will exec produce with Brad Kern, Peter Johnson and McG. Mark Valley, Chi McBride and Jackie Earle Haley star.

Next Season Smallville Superman to Wear Cape and...

Sources high up at the WB have stated Smallville Superman will be wearing the blue and red tights along with the cape in next season's (season 9) Smallville. Many thought it would be impossible considering how continuity is very important with Smallville's writers, but as always, where there is a will, there is a way.

The writers do not want to bring in the glasses yet and because of that, Tom Welling will be wearing a cowl to hide the majority of his face. Not sure if this will give him too much of a "Batman" look, but I'm sure more eyes will be tempted to stop and tune in.