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HD Streaming for EVE Fanfest now on sale
Are you a big fan of EVE Online? Do you want to go to EVE Fanfest but can't fit a trip to Iceland into your budget? Do you have a spare PLEX sitting around? Are you thinking about marzipan? Because right now you can buy a high-definition stream of the entire Fanfest from CCP Games for $19.95 or one PLEX, whichever works better for you. (The marzipan thing you'll have to sort out on your own.) Buying the stream gets you access to three days of high-definition coverage, the pre-convention livestream from developers, your choice of one of four industrial ship skins, subscriber-only giveaways, and a digital version of the Fanfest shirt for 2014. Sound good to you? Then head on over and drop your money! Or you can just watch the festivities streamed for free on Twitch, but you'll have to put up with normal definition footage, like an animal.
Netflix's ISP report card is much less interesting now that it's out
As promised, Netflix has released performance statistics for U.S. and Canadian ISPs, culled from the many HD streams it provides. Unfortunately there's not much enlightening information to be found, while Charter did rank at the top in overall average bitrate the other major cable ISPs like Comcast, Cox and Time Warner weren't far behind, with only the smaller DSL providers appearing to lag behind and Clearwire's 4G service at the absolute lowest (no mobile data here, these were averaged from HD streams and devices only.) The most interesting data at first glance is Verizon mired squarely in the middle, although it's hard to tell if its own DSL customers are actually dragging down the lightning performance one would expect to experience on FiOS. Also potentially impacting performance are the number of lower-speed capped packages in use, mostly on DSL lines. Ultimately, it's really difficult to pull any useful data from the charts provided but given time we may be able to observe any notable shifts in performance, if they occur. Go ahead and click through for the Canadian chart and a breakdown of the data presented and how it was accumulated. Update: We confirmed with Netflix that the Verizon stats are combined DSL and FiOS numbers, so we probably wouldn't cancel the order for that 40Mbps fiber for a cable connection just yet. There's absolutely no way to extrapolate any kind of potential personal viewer experience from these numbers the way they're compiled.
AT&T's U-Verse trumpets second quarter gains, new features while sneaking in more HD streams
Judging by its own report, AT&T is proud to have grown U-Verse to 2.5 million TV customers while adding features like My Multiview, which lets users plug in four channels of their choice to watch at once, and the new Chicago Cubs branded Multiview app that enables local fans to view the main broadcast plus three of any six additional camera angles on one screen. But one of the biggest recent additions wasn't mentioned in these press releases, as it's quietly strengthened one of the weaknesses we've complained about most, increasing from two simultaneous HD streams per household to 3 (or 4, as pictured above by U-VerseUsers forum poster txskeets.) VP Jeff Weber tells us the upgrade covers the overwhelming majority of users, so watching ESPN in one room, Shark Week in another and DVRing iCarly all in high definition should be no problem now. We're still waiting to hear specifics about Xbox 360 and Windows Media Center tie-ins, but we'll make do with this item being checked off of the list for now.
