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macOS Ventura preview: Stage Manager is the star of the show
Apple's Stage Manager is the star of the show in macOS Ventura.
Xbox 360 IPTV rumors ride again with 'Project Orapa'
Just because Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV service is finally supported on the Xbox 360 after years and years of expectations (as seen above) doesn't mean the rumor mill stops, with rumors surfacing of a "Project Orapa" that reportedly combines Xbox Live, Kinect and IPTV service all in one. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has heard from tipsters that it's related to the previously rumored Ventura multimedia project and will let subscribers to Mediaroom powered IPTV services like U-Verse use Kinect's gesture and voice recognition like ESPN3 already does to control their TV experience while Xbox users would get "more content." We should find out how much of this is reality and how it ties into previous rumors pretty quickly, since it's apparently going to be in testing this month, and available by the upcoming holiday season.
Microsoft's Ventura could be a cloud music / video platform, have something to do with Zune
Zune hasn't gotten much love from Microsoft as of late, but that might change over time -- ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley noticed that the company is staffing up for a cloud-based multimedia project (by a group known as "Ventura Media Services") directed at PCs, TVs and mobile devices. "The team is a tight group of music and video lovers that create services and experiences revolving around music/video discovery and consumption," read a series of job postings that date back at least as far as July of 2010, calling for software developers in Beijing and Redmond who are familiar with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. (Two of them have "Zune" in the job title.) While it's hard to say if this project is a major focus for Microsoft no matter how often the job posting says "large scale" (we count four times) it'd definitely be nice to have some competition for Google and Apple when they start drawing the multimedia-streaming battle lines. [Thanks, zblack]
Ventura, CA gets two NBC HD channels from Charter, more on the way
Charter doesn't have the greatest reputation in Ventura, California (or most anywhere, for that matter), but the company is apparently trying to garner some love by throwing in two undisclosed NBC stations in high-def just before the Olympics kick off this Friday. Customers will still be waiting until 2009 to see video-on-demand, but HD junkies will be thrilled to know that more channels are on the way. According to company spokesman Del Heintz, nine more HD channels will be added to the lineup in September, though your guess is as good as ours as to which ones will go live. So, who's up for watching to see if it actually delivers on said promise?
