The big box retailer partnered with CinemaNow owner Sonic Solutions to provide streaming content via prefab setups in the retailer’s lineup of “connected consumer electronics” such as TVs and Blu-ray players. Best Buy says it’s in talks with various hardware manufacturers.

In theory, Best Buy is taking on Amazon, the iTunes Store and Netflix in the movie streaming space.

The retailer said it would start promoting digital delivery in its many stores (where DVDs and Blu-rays already are starting to lose floor space.) Remember, Best Buy bought what’s left of Napster in 2008.

Selling low-fi electronics to Joe and Mrs. Sixpack, of course, offers Best Buy a killer opportunity to push its own streaming-content brand. No name or pricing structure was announced, although the Los Angeles Times said Best Buy planned to experiment with various models, including subscriptions and ad sponsorship.

Here comes the Best Buy-CinemaNow deal’s canned statement: “We expect on-demand entertainment to quickly grow into a mass market activity, with digital sell-through and rental becoming a significant new revenue stream for content owners,” said Dave Habiger, president and CEO of Sonic Solutions.

CinemaNow, no longer a standalone, claims to have more than 20,000 movies at the ready. Unfortunately, many are the same “classics” and weary catalog titles found on Netflix’s Watch Instantly. Roxio CinemaNow’s biggest partner is Blockbuster, although it’s done some preliminary dealing with Netflix on streaming content.

Best Buy said the movie downloads would be tried on “web-connected television sets, portable media players, PCs, Blu-ray Disc players, set-top boxes and mobile phones.” (Sonic Solutions calls that sort of thing the “Roxio CinemaNow ecosystem.”)

Apple, meanwhile, is said to be working on a subscription TV service that would run off the existing iTunes Store software. The $30 or so subscription fee is relatively steep, but could be a good deal for the many people who now get their TV programming online (compared with TV and satellite). Disney is expected to sign on first, reports Peter Kafka of All Things Digital.

Hoffner is off to Barry Diller’s new multimedia production unit at IAC, joining Ben Silverman. Chris Maxcy, who handled music partnerships, steps up to take Hoffner’s place.

Hoffner starts off with some serious traction: YouTube’s live (and archived) global webcast of U2’s Rose Bowl gig has sent out more than 10 million streams since Oct. 25. It’s a beautifully done concert presentation with solid sound and imaginative visuals. YouTube also just wooed back Warner Music artists .

The DIY video giant also has been in content talks with majors Warner Bros. and Sony, as well as MGM and Lionsgate. YouTube recently created a “Shows” section for professional video. YouTube also made baby-step deals for short-form content and trailers from DIsney/ABC and Time Warner.

The Netflix deal with Microsoft (Xbox) simply expired.

Not much to get excited about, really. As we’ve written before, the Watch Instantly is underwhelming, a lot of average to low-grade movies that are generally available any night on free TV.

On the Xbox 360, the two-step process to get the film streaming into your game console was a clunky pain, and once there the images looked borderline crappy.

This part is getting even worse on PS3, for now. In order to get the service, PS3 users have to insert a Netflix-supplied Blu-ray disc into their players, which also have to be connected to the Internet. A software update apparently will fix this later.

Also in line for the service, apparently, are owners of Nintendo’s Wii system. Tech blogger Dan Rayburn says he’s been leaked photos of the Wii-Netflix service, which could come this year.

Meanwhile, in other lame-tech news, Apple TV has been upgraded to 3.0 software. The changes mostly allow for more features from the iTunes Store such as the LP multimedia packages. No support for outside content, such as the Netflix package.

Macworld called the Apple TV 3.0 update “a pleasant improvement that addresses some lingering interface issues while adding whole new levels of mystery about exactly what (if anything) Apple is going to do with the product.”

Update: Apparently the Apple TV 3.0 update wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience for end users. Let’s hear it directly from Apple:

There is an issue with Apple TV software version 3.0 that can possibly cause your content to disappear after a period of time. All customers running Apple TV software version 3.0 should immediately restart their Apple TV and then upgrade to Apple TV software version 3.0.1.

Yes, that’s disappearing content.

After the botched iPhone 3G update … and the iTunes update that resulted in mysteriously AWOL library MP3 … you’d think they would be more careful. Someone should make a TV ad about this.

The popular online video site that’s prized for its free streams of TV shows “needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business,” Carey told a broadcasting conference Oct. 22.

News Corp. owns Hulu along with NBC Universal and Disney.

He was quoted on Hulu’s future by Broadcasting & Cable, which sponsored the conference.

Carey predicted some paid content would show up on Hulu in 2010, but admitted he’d only sat in on one of its board meetings. He said an outright firewall didn’t make sense, but charging for specialty video such as TV previews did.

“I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of (News Corp.’s) content,” Carey said. “I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value.”

Criterion’s online video service started up about a year ago, serving up titles such as “La Strada,” “Grey Gardens,” “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” “Monterey Pop” and “M.” Vudu subscribers can access the films via their box or Vudu-ready TVs and Blu-ray players.

Pretty much everything released by the Criterion Collection is worth watching and owning, but so far the streaming movies contain only a few of the label’s greatest films. For every “L’Aveventura,” there are a a half dozen titles like “Fat Girl,” “Bombay Talkie” and “Hopscotch.” Feeling adventurous? Check out Chris Marker’s “Sans Soliel” or the thriller “The Vanishing.”

On Criterion’s “Online Cinematheque” site, the movies go for $5, but they appear to be $3 on Vudu. The advantage via Vudu is the movies stream directly to your television.

“The Criterion Collection has a long history of delivering the most significant movies of our times from the highest quality video and audio source files available,” press-released Alain Rossmann, CEO of Vudu.

Criterion co-founder Jonathan Turell said the label was “impressed with Vudu’s quality.” Indeed, there is an above-average selection of foreign films on the service, for example.

Of course the highest-quality source for these films remains Criterion’s newish line of Blu-ray discs and its current-version DVDs. But the more Criterion the better, so Vudu subs are plugged into a good thing.

Executives at the third-biggest music company said they would receive “a vast majority” of any ad revenues generated by videos from Warner artists. That includes Coldplay, Madonna, Green Day and a zillion catalog artists such as the Monkees, Joni Mitchell and the B-52s.

The Warner-Google money dispute over YouTube led to a rude and sudden cutoff of Warner videos last December. (Google owns YouTube.) The online video giant now has all the music majors in line — Warner, Sony, Universal and EMI. Warner pulled its troops out of LastFM as well, back in June. That annoying dispute continues.

WMG chieftain Edgar Bronfman Jr. has criticized online entertainment providers for being “slow to create monetization tools.”

Of the new deal with Warner, Chris Maxcy, head of Music partnerships at YouTube, told analysts and reporters: “It sets us up for a sustainable partnership going forward by sharing revenues, where the vast majority of the revenues will be going to Warner Music associated with advertising when consumers watch or listen to the content on YouTube.”

Translation: Much was surrendered but much was gained.

Almost 40 percent of that traffic went to Google’s YouTube, of course. The UGC site served up 10 billion videos during the month, yes, another record. Google Sites pulled in 121 million unique viewers in the period, making the average consumption 83 videos. Your basic Hulu guy, by comparison, watched almost 13 videos.

(Note to the confused: ComScore lists YouTube under “Google Sites,” but 99 percent of that comes from YouTube.)

Microsoft Sites was the distant second, with 547 million (2.2 percent) followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1 percent) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9 percent). Hulu has settled into the middle of the pack after making a run up the rankings in the spring.

Read the comScore lite report.

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, pictured, is scheduled to make the announcement Monday, various news media reported.

The news is quite good for the online video industry and its customers, both of whom gobble bandwidth and increasingly threaten traditional video media such as TV broadcasters and cable TV companies.

The Net neutrality rules are intended to prevent cablers and telcoms from denying access to potential rivals, such as online video providers and Internet phone-service providers. A lesser form of discrimination emerged with the deliberate slowing of data packets.

Obama’s choice of Genachowski for the top FCC post virtually guaranteed Net neutrality would be adopted in some form. The tech-savvy chairman is a former venture capitalist who worked for Barry Diller’s e-commerce company IAC/InterActive Corp.

The FCC’s tilt toward neutrality predates the Obama administration, however.

Even before the president took office, the FCC strong-armed Comcast, the giant cabler and Internet service provider, into halting its practice of throttling media file-sharing activities. Comcast had been limiting the bandwidth resources given to heavy online video users. In 2005, a broadband service provider in North Carolina consented to stop blocking access to a Vonage telecommunications application.

The formal adoption of Net neutrality would give the FCC the power to shut down any similar activities by ISPs.

The outlawing of Net discrimination also helps protect against ISPs censoring specific Web sites or other online content providers.

At his confirmation hearings, Genachowski vowed to lead “a 21st century agency for the information age” that would ensure “the Internet remains robust, open and safe.”

The Wall Street Journal web site broke the news that Google’s amateur video giant has been in talks with Sony, Warner Bros., MGM and Lionsgate for full-length Hollywood fare.

At least some of the video rentals would be day and date with DVDs and Blu-rays’ arrival at Blockbuster and other traditional outlets, several sources said.

YouTube has been pushing the studios for a free, ad-driven model, but Hollywood seeks rental fees such as those on Amazon’s Video On Demand service and the iTunes Store. The studios apparently remain resistant to closing the online release window to match DVD availability.

YouTube recently created a “Shows” section for professional video, embraced widescreen ratios and is offering what passes for HD on the Internet. The Google property also made first-step deals for clips and trailers from DIsney/ABC and Time Warner.

YouTube said in a statement: “While we don’t comment on rumor and speculation, we hope to expand both on our great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community.”

Google’s video sites (YouTube, basically) streamed 8.9 million files in July, accounting for 42 percent of all videos viewed online, according to comScore.

– Steve Jobs, Oct. 14, 2008

The Apple chieftain’s decision to wait until Blu-ray “takes off” means we should be seeing some movement regarding the high definition format right about now. Blu-rays are consistently selling at the same rate as DVDs these days, at least on top-tier titles, and DVDs are feeling increasingly like the cheap seats.

Any speculation about Apple’s plans has to be viewed with skepticism, in part because there’s so much of it, but there is an alignment between a couple of unsourced pieces of info floating around out there.

Throw reports from Tech Crunch, Boy Genius Report and AppleInsider in a blender and your info-smoothie has it that iTunes 9 will contain support for the Blu-ray format, aligning with new iMacs that play the true high def format. This is all “rumor and speculation,” of course, but you have to wonder what is taking the tech colossus of Cupertino so long to get with the program.

True, Blu-ray remains shaky in some ways, with continuing annoyances on several fronts for consumers. HD DVD used to market itself against the Blu-ray camp with the proclamation that it was the only “market ready” format. Locked-down Blu-ray standards have been slow in coming and slower in adaptation. Up for some more of those serial firmware updates, anyone?

Watching a Blu-ray on a computer monitor seems a bit of a waste, but why not go for the best images and audio available in any format?

iTunes 9 won’t be touching down anytime soon — for the record we’re on 8.2.1 at this moment.

One of the immediate questions would be compatibility with Apple TV, the chronically dismissed box that gets video content from your computer to the TV monitor. That combo — iTunes to iMac to Apple TV to HD televisions — has bottom-line shifting implications, if it’s possible.

Duly disclaimed: I own Apple stock and I want it to go up.