“Our alliance with Vudu further demonstrates LG’s commitment to delivering the ultimate HD viewing experience, by providing instant access to more 1080p movie content than ever before,” said Peter Reiner, senior VP of marketing and strategy at LG Electronics USA. “Vudu highlights the superb video quality of our ‘Full HD’ sets with NetCast Entertainment Access, while providing consumers with access to thousands of HD movies with the touch of a button.”

Alain Rossmann, Vudu CEO, added, “Together, LG’s broadband HDTVs and the Vudu service will set the industry standard for easy access to on-demand HD movies. Vudu is blazingly fast on LG’s broadband HDTVs and makes discovering and watching new HD movies a truly exciting and fun user experience.”

The LaCinema Black Play and Record were crafted by noted designer Neil Poulton and enable using a direct network connection, or built-in Wi-Fi connection, to store music, movies and photos on internal hard drives from any computer on the local network.

A built-in universal plug-and-lay client player rapidly accesses media content from a networked PC or Mac located anywhere in the home.

The LaCinema Black models are available through the LaCie online store or LaCie resellers with storage capacities of 500GBs and 1TB, respectively. Suggested retails start at $430.

The LaCinema Black Play and Record will access downloaded HD movies and television programs directly on the television and will decode 1080p resolution movies, and HD JPEG photos. Standard-definition source material can be up-scaled to 1080i resolution.

Both units will also output surround sound through an optical audio connection.

Vudu has become the first digital video download service to offer permanent high-definition film downloads from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.

Starting immediately, Vudu users will be able to access more than 60 Disney films, including Doubt,High School Musical 3: Senior Year, No Country for Old Men, The Sixth Sense and National Treasure. Vudu said it will soon offer new movies as permanent downloads simultaneously with DVD release.

People can choose to watch either in instant high-def mode or as Vudu’s proprietary HDX, which the company touts as the highest quality download format available anywhere.

Many studios offer high-def titles for digital rental delivery through such services as Xbox Live and Netflix. Vudu in February was the first Web-based digital service to offer permanent high-def film downloads. Some services have since expanded to download-to-own high-def. Apple’s iTunes now offers a limited selection of permanent high-def titles, including MGM Home Entertainment’s Quantum of Solace(distributed by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment) and Lionsgate’s 3:10 to Yuma.

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday granted a three-year waiver to Evolution Broadband for two low-cost set-top boxes that do not include CableCards — a blanket exemption to the so-called “integration ban” that could pave the way for cable operators to deploy much less expensive set-tops.

The sub-$50 devices from Evolution Broadband covered under the waiver are one-way “limited-capability devices” that provide integrated security, referred to in the industry as digital terminal adapters. The boxes convert digital signals to analog format and don’t provide advanced functions like digital video recording.

[...]

“The FCC’s action will allow small cable operators to take their systems all-digital at a much faster pace because now they can deploy set-top boxes that will cost about $50 instead of several hundred dollars each,” Polka said in a statement. “Under this ruling, cable’s transition to digital — which the federal government is not subsidizing as it did for TV stations — will be far less costly for cable customers in this economically stressful time.”