Comedy Central and AtomFilms have announced the second annual online video competition, Comedy Central Test Pilots, this summer. Test Pilots will give viewers the chance to create their own short form comedy pilots, with the best being voted on by viewers at Comedy Central.

The winning pilot will earn its creator $5,000 and a chance for a broadband development deal with the network. It will also appear on the network’s late night series Web Shows, which features content from the Comedy Central website.

“‘We’re excited to once again tap into Comedy Central’s creative and imaginative audience,” said Lou Wallach, senior VP of original programming and development for Comedy Central in a statement. ” Comedy Central Test Pilots evens out the playing field and lets anyone with a voice, video camera, computer and spark of creativity the opportunity to get their pilots on the desktops of our development executives.”

Submissions will be accepted from June 1 st until July 10 th, with “staff picks” being featured on comedycentral.com and atomfilms.com. Comedy Central and AtomFilms executives will decide on four finalists, who will be put up for a vote on the network’s website.

AnyDVD has been updated to handle the latest updates to Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the DRM standard used to limit how next-generation DVDs can be used. Many upcoming HD DVD & Blu-ray DVD releases will use the latest revisions to AACS.

AnyDVD is designed to help users rip protected DVDs into unprotected formats so that they can be used with unsupported media players.

Here are the details on the update:

• New: AnyDVD ripper displays the volume label of the discs
• New (HD DVD & Blu-ray): Support for new titles
• New (HD DVD): Workaround for mastering error on “Relentless Enemies”
• New (HD DVD & Blu-ray): Added warning dialog, if HD DVD or Blu-ray processing did not work
• Fix (DVD): AnyDVD ripper did not work correctly with multiple angles. If you want more control (stream selection, main movie only selection, …) we recommend to use CloneDVD2 available at http://www.slysoft.com instead of AnyDVD ripper.
• Fix (DVD): Sony Arccos Decryption bug introduced in 6.1.4.3, sorry
• Some minor fixes and improvements
• Updated languages

via Engadget

Coca-Cola has announced that it is teaming with iTunes on Europe’s biggest music promotion ever, spanning 17 European countries and running from May until the end of August. As part of the promotion, Coke and iTunes will give away songs from the iTunes Store in over 2 billion promotional packs of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero.

The on-pack promotion will offer customers the chance to win free iPods and attend some of the 100-plus Coke and iTunes sponsored summer concerts across Europe.

“Coke+iTunes aims to reinvent the ways young people create, listen to, and experience music every day,” said Chris R. Burggraeve, group marketing director for the European Union Group. “European youth will enjoy this Summer 2007 the biggest pan European music experience ever. And what better way to build bridges among European cultures than through music?”

“This new pan-European initiative gives music fans across Europe the ability to download free music all summer long,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes.

via Cnet 

Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels, including EMI. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software.

Amazon’s announcement is the most promising prospect for an iTunes-killer. Amazon’s service will work with any player, Amazon already has a well-established business and audience, and Amazon’s content will be Web-based, instead of a proprietary interface like Apple’s iTunes.

Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will let customers play their music on PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes, Zens and burn songs to CDs for personal use.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. “We’re excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone.”

Microsoft is now offering the Zune – Halo 3 Edition, which comes preloaded with a collection of Halo-related music, videos and artwork:

Videos:

• Halo 3 ‚ÄúStarry Night‚Äù advertisement
• Halo 3 E3 2006 announcement trailer
• Halo 2 theatrical teaser trailer
• Three Halo 3 ‚Äúmaking of‚Äù documentary videos
• A custom episode of Red vs. Blue ‚Äì just for Zune!
• The first six episodes of Red vs. Blue Season 1

Music:

• Halo Original Soundtrack ‚Äì Complete Album
• Halo 2 Original Soundtrack, Volume 1 ‚Äì All tracks by Marty O‚ÄôDonnell and Michael Salvatori
• Halo 2 Original Soundtrack, Volume 2 ‚Äì Complete Album

Artwork:

• 120+ images, including game concept art, storyboards, paintings, and conceptual marketing imagery

The Zune Halo 3 Edition retails for $249.99.

via Gamestop 

The WordPress development team has announced the immediate availability of version 2.2 “Getz” for download. This version, named in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, includes a number of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and over two hundred bug fixes.

WordPress has become popular among podcasters as a free tool for publishing blogs, podcasts and video podcasts.

New features:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background, so you always have 20 items on the page.
• Protection from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• Hooks added for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

In addition, there were also dozens of UI and accessibility improvements, ranging from more concise wording around options and links to things like a view and preview link above the content box when you’re editing a post or page.

WordPress is a free download and is open source.

PennSound, a project of the University of Pennsylvania, is a Web-based archive for noncommercial distribution of the largest collection of poetry sound files on the Internet. PennSound offers a large variety of digital recordings of poems — currently 1,500 and fast growing — mostly as song-length singles.

“This has never been done before,” said Al Filreis, PennSound co-director, English professor and director of Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. “Most of the electronic sound files available to the public are of entire poetry recordings, 30 or more minutes long, with no tracking of individual cuts or poems.”

“We believe philosophically that, since there is no significant profit to be gained by the sale of recorded poetry — unlike music — many, many more poets will continue to grant us permission to use their work,” adds Filreis.
The archive includes works by Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others.

It looks like the recent Valleywag hype on Natalie Portman becoming the first 24/7 lifecast video star was unfounded.

Boston.com reports that the supposed investor in the project, George Zachary of the Waltham-based Charles River Ventures, has revealed the Natalie Portman lifecast to be bogus.

“We do enjoy talking with Natalie but don’t have more to publicly state at this time,” said Zachary. “I would add that what was published online about Natalie and lifecasting is 100 percent fabricated and untrue.”

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pushing Congress to enact a sweeping new intellectual property bill, the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy where no actual copyright infringement occurs.

“To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated,” Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

To many, the bill seems like something from a sci-fi movie dystopia, because it would:

• Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright.
• Make using pirated software punishable by life imprisonment
• Permit more wiretaps for investigating suspected copyright violations.
• Make it easier for the government to seize your computer. .
• Increase penalties for violating the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention regulations.
• Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes.
• Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America when CDs with unauthorized copies of musical performances are attempted to be imported.

More discussion: Scoble, Dave Winer

Media delivery network Akamai Technologies today announced the availability of Akamai Live Streaming in the Adobe Flash FLV format for delivering live, real-time audio and video formatted for playback using the Adobe Flash Player.

Akamai’s distributed architecture is designed to handle live online events and scale to support thousands of simultaneous viewers. Through a series of beta events, the service has already proven its ability to scale to support thousands of concurrent users.

Akamai is also launching a dedicated Flash resource site including white papers, technical tips and development tools.

“Akamai’s goal is to not only to deliver high quality streaming, but to create a seamless end-to-end integrated experience that works flawlessly,” said Brad Rinklin, Vice President of Marketing, Akamai Technologies.