Flickr has announced expanded mobile support, including mobile viewing of Flickr videos:

Today we’re releasing several upgrades to m.flickr.com. If you’ve got a smartphone with one of the fancier new mobile browsers, you’ll experience a completely new version of our mobile site, one that’s built around the things that are most important to you when you’re on the go.

First, the sexy part — you can now view Flickr videos on your mobile phone! Videos uploaded from today forward will be immediately viewable through our mobile site. As of today this particular feature is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users only, but we expect to rapidly expand the number of devices that we support.

The activity stream now has more information in it, all synched to the settings you specify on the main Flickr site. For the first time you can now comment on, and favorite, photos from your mobile phone. And it’s also wonderfully simple to add, find, and manage your contacts.

Emailing photos from your mobile phone to Flickr also gets a little easier. We’ve made your secret Flickr upload email address a cinch to find and use. Just enter it in your address book under the name “Flickr”, then email us whenever you shoot something interesting.

Finally, if nothing’s happening in your part of the Flickrverse, we’ve made it very easy to browse the most interesting photos of the day, or do a search of the 3 billion+ photos that live on Flickr.

In other words – if you got an iPhone, Flickr is getting a lot cooler. The updated Flickr mobile site loads quickly and is easy to navigate on the iPhone, with navigation limited to most frequently used items.

Open Air Cinema has announced the availability of its new 16ft x 9ft Open Air Home Screen, a giant inflatable movie screen.

Open Air Cinema sells the 16-foot screen for $999. The company offers two other sizes of its inflatable movie screens for home use. The 12ft x 7ft version is priced at $599 and the 9-foot version is priced at $449.

The screen is available by itself or as part of the CineBox Home Backyard Theater package, which includes projection, sound, and all cables needed to operate a backyard theater.

This thing looks like a little slice of guerrilla drive-in awesomeness.

Zune fans may have some fun with this: Barack Obama was apparently seen using a portable media player that appeared to be a Zune! OMG!!!

In what has already been termed Zunegate, Philadelphia’s City Paper writer Neal Santos reports that Obama was seen listening to a Zune while working out. 

Maybe:

I want to correct what I said yesterday about Obama using a Zune. I claimed that it was his Zune. I don’t know for sure that it was his. It could belong to one of the many Secret Service dudes that were at the gym, Michelle, or even one of his daughters. His headphones were not the standard iPod headphones, rather ones that wrap around your ear like the image to the right. The headphones were gray colored, either because they were gray or because they were really worn from use.

I vividly remember Obama pulling out an MP3 player with his left hand while exercising on the machine. It had a dark case protecting it and from what I saw, he was using a Zune.

Lets’s hope this is the closest thing we have to a scandal with Obama for a long time.

Openfilm.com, an online video site that focuses on independent films, shorts and animations, has announced a variety of new tools and features to assist independent filmmakers in showcasing their work.

Highlights of the update include:

• viewing recommendations and film reviews;
• advice for filmmakers on everything from production to surviving Hollywood;
• video playback and channel pages are more comment friendly;
• customized RSS feeds are available for all categories of videos, channels, blogs and reviews;
• a new feature in the video player enables viewers to immediately jump to any point in a film; and
• a database of film festivals worldwide.

Users can now browse and search over 1000 festivals from around the world by locations, dates and genres, and find detailed information about eligibility, awards, and submission dates.

“Openfilm.com intends to become the community of choice for independent filmmakers and the audiences who want to connect with their work,” said Timothy Pastushkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Openfilm. 

If you haven’t checked out Openfilm, yet, you may want to. It’s got a growing collection of indie content, focusing on work with professional production values.

Resolume Avenue 3 is a real-time, multi-platform instrument for live (audio) visual performances.

The app is a free download, but it displays a video watermark on the output without paid registration.

Features:

• Audiovisual Playback - Play Quicktime and AVI video files with audio or combine any .mov or .avi video file with any .wav or .aiff audio file.
• Audiovisual Effects - Resolume 3 supports both VST audio effects and FreeFrameGL openGL video effects. Use them separately or combine them to create exciting new audiovisual effects. You can use as many effects as you like on clips, layers and the entire composition.
• 3D Compositing - Freely position, scale and rotate your clips and layers or even the entire composition.
• OpenGL Accelerated - The entire video engine is running in 32 bit floating point precision on the video card’s GPU so you can use alpha channels and masks and get the best image quality possible on today’s hardware.
• Global BPM Tempo - Everything can be linked to the global (Beats Per Minute) tempo to create a fully synchronized audiovisual performance. Automatically pitch the audio and video and synchronize parameter automation. Use the beat snap function to trigger clips in sync with the beat.
• Flexible Interface - The Resolume 3 interface scales to the size of your monitor. Use it on a 1280×800 laptop screen or on a 30 Inch 2560×1600 resolution screen. The more screen-real-estate you have the more comfortable it is to use any number of clips and layers.
• Output and Preview Monitors - With the preview monitor you preview a clip or layer and configure it so it looks and sounds just the way you like it before you play it.
• Video mapping - With the keystone plugin and masks your screen does not have to be rectangular anymore. You can map the video onto any object or surface. Combined with multi-screen output you can even project on multiple surfaces or objects.
• Multi-screen - Because Resolume Avenue can output any resolution it works perfectly with the Matrox DualHead and TrippleHead to deliver multi-screen performances.
• MIDI & OSC - Use MIDI from any device or software to control the entire interface. Want more precision & flexibility? Resolume 3 can receive OSC (Open Sound Control) messages too!
• Crossfader - Assign any layer to the A or B bus of the crossfader and mix it just like you do on a DJ mixer but now with audio and video.
• Cross-platform - Because Resolume 3 uses cross-platform technologies like openGL and C++ it runs on both Mac OSX 10.4.9 or later and Windows XP & Vista.

MobiTV has announced its mobile television and radio service has topped the five million subscriber mark for its subscription video service.

According to the company, both growth and usage jumped as a result of interest in the recent US elections.

“We witnessed an extraordinary increase in the number of subscribers that tuned into the presidential debates and election day news,” said Paul Scanlan, president and co-founder of MobiTV. “There was a 111 percent increase over average daily viewing during the third presidential debate and a 373 percent increase for election day. Those numbers not only indicate exciting times for U.S. politics, but for mobile television as well.”

MobiTV’s service delivers live television, premium and primetime programming, video-on-demand and satellite and digital music services to mobile devices.

Wizzard Media announced today that video embedded on internet websites using the Wizzard Player can now be viewed on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

In the past, Apple devices, due to their lack of Flash support, have not been able to access most embedded Web video. When visiting a video website using the iPhone, the screen appears blank where the video would normally be.

The update is part of Wizzard Media’s plan to extend its podcast advertising platform to the iPhone in January 2009.

“This new technology allows advertisers to reach their target customers with appealing video advertising on the hottest platform on the planet, the iPhone,” said Chris Spencer, Wizzard Media CEO.

UPDATE: Rob Walch, Wizzard’s VP of Podcaster Relations, got in touch tonight to add that “the big news is that this feature is now also available for Audio Podcasters – not just the video ones – as was the case when the release first was published.”

IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, has a nice mix of new independent holiday music on the latest episode of its IODA Promonet Podcast.

IODA is a digital distributor of independent music of every genre, from thousands of different record labels, and promotes that music to retailers, distributors, bloggers, and podcasters through its Promonet service. Its monthly-ish podcast features a cross-section of the broad IODA catalog. Sometimes the podcast is a shuffled mix of styles and genres, and sometimes the podcast is topical (like this winter holiday one, the Halloween one, or even the Talk Like A Pirate Day episode).

The current holiday issue ranges widely, from “The Nutcracker” to jazz standards to the excellent gospel choir Sounds of Blackness (whose first Christmas album was fantastic).

The feed for IODA Promonet’s podcast is here.

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren reports that the social music service has reached the milestone of 2 million iPhone users:

At 10:04am this morning we hit 2,000,000 registered iPhone Pandora users!

We’re hearing all sorts of wonderful feedback from listeners who are using it on their commute, jogging with it, plugging it into home audio systems…you name it. And as usual, offering all sorts of great feedback and suggestions. It’s thrilling for us to see the broader vision for Pandora take shape. Our hearty thanks for your continued support and input.

It also makes us very happy to know that the 60,000+ artists in our collection are now getting played on car radios all across the country. Times they are a changin’ …

This is an impressive milestone for Pandora, but also highlights the growing importance of the iPhone as a platform for social media applications.

For about fifteen years, our family has had a tradition of a shared Advent calendar. Every day from December 1 – 24, the children take turns opening the little packages, one for each day of the Advent season.

After a disastrously messy first year’s (chocolate) calendar when our boys were toddlers, we’ve had many years’ enjoyment with Playmobil calendars. Every day is a different little box, with a different little posable guy or accessory, and by Yule, you have a whole vignette – Santa’s workshop, or a holiday bakery, or a forest in wintertime.  We look forward to revealing that new surprise every day.

Added to my daily Advent routine this year is Grant’s Advent Calendar, a daily video podcast.  Every day, host Grant Baciocco reveals the prize hiding behind that day’s tiny calendar door. The presents are small (so far: color-change Silly Putty, and a Reese’s peanut butter chocolate tree), but Baciocco clearly revels in the process, and that childlike excitement is contagious.

Other media creators are following suit, making their own Advent video podcasts, like this one by Breakman Z. The “rules” for the Advent podcast, as I understand them, are as follows:

filmed in one take,
no peeking in advance at that day’s surprise,
videos have to be published on the same day

The feed for Grant’s Advent Calendar is here.

Baciocco encourages others to follow suit. If you have a holiday (Yule, Christmas, Channukah, or something equally festive) podcast, please let us know in the comments.