When Roku said it would start shipping its media streaming boxes to the U.K. for the first time last month, there was a significant omission from the lineup of services it was offering — the BBC’s iPlayer.

The iPlayer is the dominant force in Britain’s streaming TV landscape, available everywhere from the PC to cable to mobile, and responsible for nearly two billion viewings in 2011 alone.

No surprise, then, that today Roku is announcing that it’s launching an iPlayer channel for its British customers, allowing them to access the service’s library of popular television programs through their devices.

The moves adds a real backbone to the service — which already boasts a lineup including UFC, Fox News, and Netflix, which launched last month in the U.K and Ireland.

“This is among the first of many significant content partnerships for Roku in Europe and we look forward to making additional announcements in the coming weeks,” said the company’s European boss, Clive Hudson.

Rumors continue to circulate that will soon add Netflix competitor Lovefilm, but the deal with the BBC makes a big difference for anyone purchasing a Roku box, which are priced locally at £49.99 and £99.99 ($ 79 and $ 158).

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Amazon has aggressively grown its Prime Instant Videos service over the past year, more than tripling the amount of content available to subscribers since launch. And as Amazon continues to add more content to Prime Instant Video, there have been speculations that it could introduce a service not tied to its Amazon Prime offering. But that’s probably not in the cards — at least not in the near term — according to the company’s top video content acquisition exec.

Today, access to its streaming video service comes bundled with Amazon Prime. But some rumors have emerged lately, suggesting that Amazon could unbundle the service and offer it as a standalone competitor to Netflix or Hulu Plus. That includes a mention from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who wrote in a letter to shareholders that he expects Amazon to introduce the service and price it below Netflix’s own offering.

But Brad Beale, Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition at Amazon, said in an interview Wednesday that the company is unlikely to break out the video subscription offering anytime soon. “The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers,” Beale said. “The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today — we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future.”

Even before adding the video component, Beale said that Prime was an incredible value. The offering provides free, two-day shipping to customers who pay an annual $ 79 subscription. We’ve believed for a while that adding video could entice some customers to sign up for Amazon Prime who might otherwise not have — and once they’ve paid the annual subscription fee, they’re likely to take advantage of the free shipping. In that sense, video could be seen as a loss leader for driving more physical retail sales.

There’s also the fact that having a free subscription service could help boost transactional sales through Amazon’s VOD and electronic sell-through offering. While Prime Instant Video has 15,000 titles for free viewing, it doesn’t have many of the latest new release films or in-season TV episodes. For newer content, Amazon offers more than 100,000 titles for rental or purchase. So an Amazon user who got hooked on older seasons of Downton Abbey or Sons of Anarchy on the free service might convert to being a paid user to watch the current seasons of those shows.

As Amazon adds content, it’s also looking to boost awareness of what’s available on the service. That includes placement of a letter from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the site’s homepage, letting the millions of users who stop by every day know what new content is available from Amazon Prime. That kind of promotion is driving awareness and usage, Beale told me. As more customers learn what’s available, and as Amazon continues to improve the offering with even more content, he expects customer adoption to grow even more.

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A new rumor claims that Google is close to launching its own cloud-based storage service that could compete with other businesses like Dropbox or Microsoft’s Skydrive. Read more…

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Microsoft has sent out invitations today to a special leap year day Consumer Preview Launch in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, and since we’ve been promised a “late February” availability for the not-a-beta, we’re assuming we’ll be able to download the bits on February 29, 2012.

Developers and others were able to preview Windows 8 in a bare bones Developer Preview available at Build last November, and it sounds like some of the more anticipated features of Windows 8 (including a new version of Windows Media Center) still won’t be supplied with this Consumer Preview.

We should get our first look at the pre-bundled Metro style apps that appear to be a replacement for Windows Live Essentials, however.  Tom Warren at the Verge listed a number of apps (with possibly more to come with the CP) thought to be bundled with the Consumer Preview:

• Camera
• Messaging
• Mail
• Calendar
• SkyDrive
• People
• Photos
• Video
• Music

Tom also details some more information about the apps, and adds further fuel to the “Zune is dead” fire:

These applications, and possibly more, will come preinstalled for the Consumer Preview release, and will be updatable from the Windows Store. Mail, Calendar, People, and Messaging are designed to be core Windows communications apps and are not branded with Windows Live. One source has revealed that Microsoft is working to enable SMS support for the Messaging app which operates as a Windows Live Messenger equivalent in its current form. The Music and Video applications are currently branded with Zune, but are built by the Xbox team. We are hearing that this branding will be removed shortly before the Windows 8 release, moving to Xbox Live for Windows as the entertainment brand for Windows 8 Music, Video and Games.

Of course for Windows Live fans, there are still lots of unanswered questions.  What happens to Live Mesh and Writer?  What about continued Windows Live Essentials development for Windows 7?  How will Windows Live Messenger and Skype evolve?  At least, barring the usual snafus, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out.

LiveSide.net

Samsung’s next flagship phone, the Galaxy S III, is expected to be super-thin and run on a quad-core processor, with availability in May. The alleged details appeared on the Korean site, Electronics Times News, found by way of the Boy Genius Report blog.

Whether the information is simply speculation or not, the details actually make sense when you look at Samsung’s Galaxy S and Galaxy S II smartphones. Both were top sellers for Samsung and have helped the company compete with Apple for the smartphone sales crown. Each was a flagship Android handset combining capable hardware with Samsung’s custom user interface.

According to ETNews, the Galaxy S III will follow suit by using a quad-core processor with radio support for HSPA+ and LTE networks. That makes sense as back in October, it was discovered that Samsung’s newest Exynos chip, the 4412, will support four processing cores. Current top-end devices such as the Galaxy Note, Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 7.7 use the dual-core, Exynos 4210.

The new Galaxy S III will reportedly be just 7 millimeters thick, which is thin, but still thicker than the Galaxy S II “clone” I saw at the Consumer Electronics Show last month: Huawei debuted the Ascent P1 S and I immediately thought it was a Samsung GS II.

I’d expect the Galaxy S III to also use Samsung’s Super AMOLED display technology with resolution at least comparable to, if not better than the 1280 x 720 screen on the Galaxy Nexus handset. That would also imply a large screen-size; I’ll go for 4.5-inches as a best guess.

I was hoping to find out all of the details later this month at the Mobile World Congress event, but Samsung recently said we’d be waiting until sometime in the first half of this year.

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Sony has announced more information about the launch bundles that will be made available to US customers when they purchase the PS Vita portable console in mid-February. Read more…

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Facebook has announced that Timeline, its new version of the user profile feature, will go live for all users of Facebook in the next few weeks as the old profile page will disappear. Read more…

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Facebook has announced that Timeline, its new version of the user profile feature, will go live for all users of Facebook in the next few weeks as the old profile page will disappear. Read more…

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Screenshot of Eater Dating (click to enlarge)

Eater.com, the popular blog network that covers bar and restaurant news across 15 metropolitan areas, has teamed up with online matchmaking service HowAboutWe to launch “Eater Dating.”

HowAboutWe is a brilliantly simple site which lets people plan first dates around events they both want to do (i.e. “Go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.”) So naturally, Eater Dating, which is powered by HowAboutWe, will encourage people to set up foodie-centric dates, such as “Sit outside and eat oysters at the Ferry Building” or “Get dressed up for martinis at the Cafe Carlyle.”

In a blog post announcing the new dating feature, Eater’s Austin Pollock wrote:

“We never thought we’d be offering such a service via these pages, but then we met the good folks behind HowAboutWe, who have done nothing less than turn online dating on its head. The beauty of HowAboutWe, and, in turn, Eater Dating, which is powered by HowAboutWe, is that it starts with the date, not the profile. You, the dater, post the kind of date you’d like to go on and choose from those who like the sound of that date. It’s a pretty elegant solution to an age-old problem.”

I think it’s a very smart partnership, as both Eater and HowAboutWe have gained lots of traction in the urban professional crowd. Eater Dating will let people hit two birds with one stone: They meet someone new, while trying a new bar or restaurant they wanted to check out anyway. It takes the pressure off of first dates, and lets people get to know each other in a more old-fashioned way — by talking in person, rather than poring over long online dating profiles. No matter how well-connected we all become virtually, real-life interactions are still what makes the world go around — so it’s nice to see services that use technology to help make that happen.

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Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4S in October has taken some of the smartphone market share in the US away from devices based on Google’s Android OS, according to a new survey by Nielsen. Read more…

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