You can use a Roku box with a Netflix subscription or the Amazon Video on Demand service to watch movies or TV shows on your TV. You connect a Roku box to both your TV and the web. Then you can cruise through the Netflix catalog and watch movies instantly as they stream via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to your TV set.

Now Saratoga, Calif.-based Roku is adding access to these sites: Blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. The sites cover everything from Internet audio to video podcasts to professional web content and photo sharing. You can access all of the sites on the TV using the Roku Channel Store. The aim is the give consumers more choice and control over their Roku player experience, said Anthony Wood, chief executive and founder of Roku.

Roku has opened up its channel store to developers who can add their own content channels in the future. Consumers can access the store by creating a Roku account, which lets them manage their channels and personalize their entertainment options. Roku customers can add or delete channels as they wish, and they can browse through new channels as developers create them.

Roku’s three players are the Roku SD, the Roku HD, and the Roku HD-XR. All are compatible with the Roku Channel Store. The store will be delivered to all existing Roku customers in the next two weeks. The company, founded in 2002, launched its first box in May 2008 and updated the models in October. The Roku SD sells for $80.

Roku has 50 employees. It competes with Apple TV, Vudu, Tivo, and connected Blu-ray movie players, not to mention cable TV services. The company’s investors include Wood, Netflix and Menlo Ventures. The company says it has sold hundreds of thousands of units.

The site pulls search results from other music sites — including Skreemr, MP3Codes, and 4Shared Music, sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.

Vye collates all of this content for the user and applies a simple, AJAX-based interface to let you build playlists, stream songs, and download them.

Letting users share and download music for free is what got Napster in trouble for copyright violations back in 2001 and led to the end of that free service. But Allatt claims that the distinction between his website and Napster is that his site is legal, despite the download availability. (An inability to download music has been the legal distinction that other sites in the music-sharing space have used to stay out of court. Streaming is considered a broadcast — as in radio — whereas downloading is a product, something that was well-defined during the Napster trials.)

Allatt says that as a search engine, “Vye Music permits users to download the content, operating under the premise that exterior copyright controls (ie. the copyright compliance of our APIs and content hosters) as well as users’ own judgment will let users stay well within the law.”

In other words, Vye doesn’t actually have any direct control over the content that appears on the site. The control is with the ultimate host of the music being streamed or downloaded. Vye merely links to those hosts through a search index. Allatt does say he plans to comply with copyright law: “DMCA takedown notices are forwarded to the relevant API providers, and the direct hosts of content wherever possible.”

It remains to be seen how well Allatt’s legal claims might hold.

The site interface and features are, however, nicely done. You can use the simple, intuitive interface without login, but you’ll need a username if you want to access more advanced sharing and storing features. Supposedly DRM-free music tracks can be downloaded directly from their links as well. I say “supposedly” because a search for Metallica brings up several download-able tunes whose only connection to Metallica is that it was the front band for the RIAA lawsuits that covered the news a couple of years ago.

As with most search tools of this nature, some of what is returned is not what you asked for and, I found, is also often not the full song. Worse yet, songs are often “Rick Rolled” to be something entirely different from their titles. This, of course, is not necessarily Vye’s problem, but it is a problem endemic to search-based apps.

As for potential competitors, the site’s closest competitors are the very same sites it pulls content from.

Allatt, who’s Australian and based on Australia’s Gold Coast, developed and maintains the site under the auspices of his company VEXiS Media. He self-funded the company, and several friends and family members assist him with the site for free.

He previously started failed music site iZaRia.us. It’s possible he’ll have better luck with this newest venture, since there are some indications the music industry may take more kindly to free online downloads than it has in the past.

Many around the Web have been saying that the RIAA lawsuits were a turning point in which the paradigm of artist-label-distributor was broken and shown to be outdated. Some artists, most notably Pearl Jam, have foregone the larger record label almost entirely, pursuing a more open approach. Up-and-coming bands often put free copies of entire albums online for download and dissemination, making money through paying gigs, concerts, and donations. The Isosceles Project in Canada is an example of that model. With the advent of high-speed data connections for most of the modern world, the days of the album and record label may be coming to a close. These new models of music distribution are likely the early versions of the new paradigm. So, perhaps Vye Music is part of those beginnings.

Sony to launch online store – Sony executive Kaz Hirai says that the Japanese electronics giant will launch its own online store modeled after its successful PlayStation Network store. The store will include connections between Sony’s consumer electronics devices and its digital content.

NY Times columnist slams Bing over China — Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the Gray Lady, called for a boycott of Microsoft’s Bing search engine today for failing to stand up to Chinese government censors. If you type Tiananmen and other controversial search subjects in simple Chinese characters in a Bing search, you get government propaganda instead of real search results. Google handles the problem in a different way, but Kristof says he isn’t buying Microsoft’s response.

Behind the FAA’s flight plan glitch — eWeek has a lengthy article describing the router failure that brought down the nation’s air traffic control system.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun looking dim — Bloomberg reports that the European Union is likely to block Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Suny Microsystems. The hangup seems to be Sun’s ownership of the MySQL database software, which competes with Oracle.

McAfee warns of 12 scams of Christmas — Beware of everything from fake electronic greeting cards to charity scams that steal your identity and credit card data. McAfee offers the warnings in a podcast.

AOL to cut 2,500 jobs — AOL is asking a third of its work force to volunteer to end their jobs. If it can’t get the volunteers, it will resort to layoffs.

EA shuts down Pandemic – Electronic Arts has shut down its Pandemic game studio amid much criticism. EA bought BioWare/Pandemic from Elevation Partners for $800 million in 2007. John Riccitiello, who left Elevation to become CEO of EA, recused himself from that purchase decision because he stood to benefit from it. Now, faced with declining demand for its games, EA is making drastic cutbacks of 1,500 jobs — including 200 at Pandemic, which was about half of the original acquisition. The decision is understandable, since Pandemic had a string of weak games, including the Lord of the Rings Conquest game we panned. But the Riccitiello critics don’t seem to care about that.

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: Apps don’t make your phone special — “It’s not the applications available on the various platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.”

Microsoft’s Xbox Live chief on banning modders and browsing Facebook photos on TV — “It’s a cat and mouse game. These were people that were pirating software.”

Modern Warfare 2 continues to blow away entertainment records — “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has set the all-time entertainment industry record, generating $550 million in sales in its first five days on the market.”

Updated: Modern Warfare 2 banned in Russia due to civilian massacre scene — “Activision Blizzard released this statement today: Reports that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been banned in Russia are erroneous.”

Former Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge joins Google, discovers Gmail — “Don Dodge, the Microsoft startup evangelist whose layoff earlier this month was much-bemoaned in the tech community, has landed on his feet, and then some.”

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun, including coverage of our Smart Grid conference GreenBeat 2009:

GreenBeat: Live-blogging Nobel Prize winner Al Gore — “The single largest solution is efficiency and the Super Grid, or the Smart Grid, plays a crucial role in several aspects of a comprehensive plan to solve the crisis.” (You can also check out our summary of Gore’s remarks.)

Politics and policy needed for the smart grid. Soon. — “At GreenBeat 2009’s Politics and Policy session, the prevalent theme was the need for a simple, efficient legislation and regulation package for the U.S. power system.”

Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon — “The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but won’t specify how much, and that’s through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google.”

Google aims to release Chrome OS netbooks by holiday season 2010 — “Although there’s been some hope that Google might launch the operating system in early 2010, Vice President of Product Marketing Sundar Pichai said Google plans to work with manufacturers to bring Chrome OS netbooks to market in time for next year’s holiday season.”

Offerpal Media sets standards to lock out scam offers — “Burned by a scandal in its offer business over inappropriate promos, Offerpal Media is moving to set standards that forbid offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable.”

5 ways VC firms can stop shooting themselves in the foot – Venture Capital firms drill the need to create basic credibility into the companies they invest in – but often fail to take their own advice. Laura Grimmer, CEO of Articulate Communications (which works with VC firms), lists five things they could do to build a better pipeline of prospective portfolio companies.

After VC cash? Show ‘em what you’ve learned – When the time came for Cafepress to seek its second round of funding, the company went about it in a slightly different way. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, a longtime board member of the company, offers a look at how they did it – and what the reaction was from investors.

Boston Millennia’s Callow on the state of the VC industry – Dana Callow has been watching the Venture Capital business morph and change for years. In this Q&A, the managing partner of Boston Millennia Partners discusses the VC shakeout, fields that have him excited and what entrepreneurs seeking capital should be doing.

Finding a buyer for your start-up – It’s hard enough to walk away from the business you built from scratch. It’s even harder to find an ideal buyer. John Ovrom founder and CEO of Exit and Answers, examines the two most common ways people begin the process when they decide to sell.

Tech mishaps and the human problem – Engineers might cringe when they hear it, but every tech problem is tied to a human problem. Serial entrepreneur Eric Ries, in this lecture given at Stanford University, demonstrates how to narrow things down and learn the root cause.

The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.

In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature today, the ability to translate tweets with a single click using Google Translate.

Thing Labs also announced a new hire — Ben Darnell, an early Google employee who worked on Reader with Thing Labs chief executive Jason Shellen. He left for FriendFeed, all of two weeks before it was sold to Facebook. Thing Labs is backed by Polaris Venture Partners and Ron Conway.

And one last easter egg, if you tweet ‘#jacob’ or ‘#edward’ into Brizzly, it will change to a Twilight theme.

The startup, which creates those green ‘Retweet’ buttons you see everywhere (including on this site), is rolling out the same feature for ads. They’re partnering with Federated Media to insert retweet buttons into their advertising two weeks from now, enabling people to share compelling ads with others.

Advertising in social streams has historically been a touchy issue (see: Facebook Beacon in 2007). Users logged into Twitter and Facebook want to see what their friends are up to, and they don’t want those personal messages to be conflated with advertising. There have also been other advertising efforts launched around Twitter, like Sponsored Tweets, which pays people to send out commercial messages. But those haven’t gained widespread traction for the very simple reason that if you pollute your stream with too many boring messages, you risk losing followers.

But Tweetmeme’s product is interesting because it returns advertising to its roots in some ways. Great advertising has always been about connecting with people — remember Apple’s “Think Different” campaign or the never-ending “Got Milk” print and TV ads. They’ve become cultural touchstones in some ways. This could incentivize online advertisers to create material that’s more engaging or social.

It’s also the direction in which advertising is headed on other social networking platforms. Facebook, for example, sends detailed metrics back to its advertisers on how many shares, likes and comments their campaigns receive. They also send how many “Hides” an advertiser’s content gets if users find it uninteresting.

We were thrilled with the turnout, and couldn’t be more grateful for all the support we received from attendees, speakers, sponsors and the press. It’s clear that the Smart Grid has gained the momentum it needs for serious work to be done, and we are excited to play a big role in this conversation going forward.

With Al Gore, and several of the biggest utilities and brightest entrepreneurs leading the charge, 2010 should be a big year for smart metering initiatives, regulatory reform and consumer conservation education. Whether or not these efforts will result in a cleaner, more efficient grid, or a population more committed to saving power (even if it’s only to trim their bills) still hinges on policy and money.

Stationed in the most progressive state for environmental legislation, and at the heart of the venture capital community, VentureBeat is ideally situated to report on how this unfolds. We’re already looking forward to future events on the power grid that will pick up where GreenBeat 2009 left off.

Once again, we’d like to thank all of our event sponsors and strategic partners for making this week’s event possible: Accenture, Southern California Edison, Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, Oracle Utilities, Schwartz Communications, Cisco Systems, CPower, CSC, S&C Electric Company, KPMG, Vantage Communications, DEMO, Matter Network and Fora.TV.

We were also honored to have so many of our colleagues from the press in attendance during the event. To thank them for their coverage, and give our readers a more holistic sense of the Smart Grid dialogue sparked by GreenBeat, here’s a roundup of articles from the last several days:

GreenBeat in the New York Times:

Google says it doesn’t want to be a utility
In Pursuit of a Smarter Grid

On Al Gore:

Al Gore: Super grid is critical to combating the climate crisis, Cleantech Group
Gore: White House shooting for climate bill by spring, Greentech Media
Al Gore: The Smart Grid is Key, Earth2Tech
Al Gore: Our next power grid will be like the Net, CNet

On Innovation Competition and winners Locust and CPower:

Data storage startup, energy manager, win GreenBeat Innovation Contest, TriplePundit
3 Next-Gen Applications for Smart Grid 2.0, Earth2Tech
Data centers that feed power to the grid?, Greentech Media
Xtreme Power named a Smart Grid innovator in VentureBeat’s Innovation Competition

Related news:
Google PowerMeter: It’s our gift to humanity, really, Greentech Media
Cisco seeks smart grid CTO, EE Times
Viridity Energy poised to make next generation of Smart Grid a reality, TMCNet
Current CEO Casey talks about SGIG, GreenBeat 2009 Award, Smart Grid Today

Here are some photos from the event — look for more media, including an image and video gallery, in the next few days.

[Photo credits: Alexa Lee, David Lin and Cheng Saechao]

Perhaps the most significant point: That energy efficiency is “the single largest solution to the climate crisis,” and the Smart Grid will “play a crucial role” in achieving that efficiency.

The Smart Grid will have a number of advantages, Gore said. It will reduce the carbon emissions that accelerate global warming.  It will give us more access to alternative energy sources like solar and wind, and will equip us to cope with the inconsistency of those sources. It will create jobs. And it will be cost-effective, eventually paying for itself by preventing grid failures and blackouts.

“The analogy to the internet is close to exact and very relevant,” Gore added. Like the internet, the Smart Grid is moving from a centralized to a distributed model, and it will spur the creation of new devices and applications.

Gore also talked about the obstacles facing the Smart Grid and other efforts to fight global warming. Those obstacles involve politics, economics, and short-term thinking. But those challenges must be overcome — because he said members of the next generation will ask one of two questions.

If the climate crisis has come to a devastating head, they’ll ask, “‘What were you thinking? Were you watching Dancing with the Stars? Didn’t you hear the scientists? Didn’t you care?’” Or they may see that we’ve taken the political, economic, and technological steps necessary to create “a new renewable energy platform and sustainable environment,” and they’ll ask, “‘How did you find the moral courage to rise and solve a crisis that so many people said was impossible to solve?’”

[photo:David Lin]

One of our newest speakers is Randy Breen, chief operating officer at Social Gaming Network, where he oversees game development, business development, strategy and executive management. He has worked in the game industry since 1986 at companies such as Electronic Arts, LucasArts and Emotiv Systems.

Today is the last chance to get DiscoveryBeat tickets at the early-bird rate of $114. That’s a 25 percent savings from the regular ticket price per attendee of $149.

As a reminder, DiscoveryBeat is all about getting your apps noticed. The event is targeted at the intersection of social, mobile and gaming trends. The event takes place in the afternoon of Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. Check out the DiscoveryBeat site for the full agenda and speakers. We’ve got a good batch of sponsors signing up for the event. A partial list of sponsors includes apps PR firm AppLaunch PR/VSC Consulting, Peter Relan’s startup incubator YouWeb, app store operator GetJar and social gaming firm SGN.

We’ll discuss the “secret recipe” for getting discovered in an age when getting discovered can mean huge viral growth and the difference between profound success or prompt failure. We think there are five main ingredients to the secret recipe for viral growth: 1) Social networking and marketing, 2) advertising, 3) web design, 4) partnering and 5) measurement.

Our previously announced speakers include John Pleasants, chief executive of social game firm Playdom, Ge Wang, co-founder and chief technology officer at music app maker Smule; Jon Vlassopulos, CEO of Zippo virtual lighter app maker Moderati; Roy Sehgal, executive producer of the Cafe World social game at Zynga; Julian Farrior, CEO and founder of iPhone hit game maker Backflip Studios; and Sebastien DeHalleux, president of social gaming firm Playfish, which was recently acquired by Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million.

Tickets are available here.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do something similar on your iPhone. You choose a style (such as E Piano Pop or Dub Tone) and tempo, sing into the iPhone, and LaDiDa adds the music. You can also share the recordings on Facebook or Twitter. A $0.99-version of LaDiDa was first released last month, and Khu.sh added a free version (with fewer musical styles) called LaDiDa Lite (iTunes link) this week. You can check out the results in the video below.

This may seem like little more than a novelty, but if musical iPhone app developer Smule can have a hit with something like I am T-Pain (which overlays your singing with Auto Tune technology), I could see plenty of iPhone owners embracing this, too — though it’s a little more challenging without the help of a hip hop star like T-Pain.

Khu.sh is based in Atlanta and has raised $120,000 in seed funding, including $20,000 from incubator Shotput Ventures.

The company said it is cutting back investment in making games and other apps for Android-based cell phones, even though Android has won a lot of attention lately with new models from Motorola and Sony Ericsson, according to Reuters.

“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference. “It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.”

By contrast, iPhone games are generating 13 percent of Gameloft’s revenue in its most recent quarter. Rochefort said that Gameloft is selling 400 times more games on iPhone than Android.

Not every developer is so disappointed with Android. Stewart Putney, chief executive of mobile games publisher and platform company Moblyng, said that he is very bullish on Android. His company has eight titles on Android and it deploys its games first on Android. One of his games recently hit No. 1 in the Android app store. (Moblyng makes a platform that allows it to publish games quickly on a bunch of different smartphones at the same time).

“Every app store is different,” Putney said.  “We have learned how to manage our Android app catalog presence and monetize our apps.  Android app monetization can be as good, or better, than iPhone- but it does require a different, more technology-driven, approach.  As app stores proliferate, older and bigger developers can’t just rely on being featured by Apple.”

Electronic Arts, the biggest mobile game company, also has faith in Android. Adam Sussman, vice president of worldwide publishing for EA Mobile, said, “We look for Google’s Android platform to become an important channel for EA Mobile and we have already launched some of EA Mobile’s most popular franchises on Android including Bejeweled and The Sims 3 with more to come, including Surviving High School, Spore Origins and many others.”

Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.

You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others to see.

All the content is curated by “likes” and “comments”, so Hot Potato can surface the most engaging posts. You can also specify that you’re “attending”, “watching” or “following” an event someone else has created like a concert.

You can look at people’s profiles and scroll through their stream of activity. Hot Potato uses Facebook Connect for log-ins, so you can pull in your existing friends. The company is backed by Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and launched at the Real-Time Crunchup in San Francisco today.

To date, 40 developers have launched official communities at Playhaven in its first month. Fans can join the online communities for free, and developers can claim the communities for free. Developers simply “click to claim” the communities, which means it’s minimal work for game creators.

The idea is to spark word-of-mouth buzz around games, which is extremely important on the iPhone because its easy to get lost among the 22,784 games among the 118,568 published iPhone apps (Mobclix numbers).

Fan reviews and ratings are especially important ways to get noticed on the iPhone, said Raymond Lau, chief executive of San Mateo, Calif.-based Playhaven, in an interview. These are the sorts of issues we’re going to discuss at our DiscoveryBeat conference on Dec. 8 in San Francisco.

“Right now, the developers fly blind because they don’t know who their fans are,” Lau said. “We want to empower the developers by establishing a community.”

Developers can add the links to the fan community into their apps for free. Lau said the company may add premium features that developers can pay for at some point in the future.

Playhaven uses the description and art work that companies submit to the AppStore when they launch, so it can easily start a new fan community for every new game. So far, the company has created more than 15,000 fan communities where fans can post game guides, tips, reviews and other content. They can also communicate with developers on the official sites. Develoeprs can create blog posts.

Some of the popular games with official forums are Aqua Globs, Radio Flare, Fare City: First Shift, Wheeler’s Treasure, Medieval and The Quest – Hero of Lukomorye I. Bryan Mitchell, the developer of Geared, found that a third of his game’s players are entering the community site every day, partly to see the fan-created guide to all 80 levels of the game. An AdMob survey found that 46 percent of iPhone users choose apps based on word-of-mouth recommendations.

Playhaven was founded in 2008 by Lau, Erik Yao, and Kurtiss Hare. Lau and Yao had previously started MyGameMug, a social networking site for gamers. It didn’t do particularly well, but it has become useful to World of Warcraft guilds that are recruiting new members. So the site is still in operation. The company has fewer than 10 employees.

Competitors who do similar things include Scoreloop, Aurora Feint’s Open Feint platform, and Ngmoco’s Plus+ platform. But Playhaven doesn’t require that its communities be integrated into a game via a software development kit. Investors include Tandem Entrepreneurs and LaunchBox Digital. The company raised an undisclosed amount for its seed round.

[The excitement in this industry is one of the reasons why we're holding an executive event called DiscoveryBeat on Dec. 8 in San Francisco. The event will explore the secret recipe for getting your social game or mobile phone application "discovered" in an age of increasing noise. Get your early bird ticket by today to get 25 percent off].

Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.

Yesterday, Google rolled out a series of videos with the slogan “Search On” promoting Googling! They include an adorable one about falling in love in Paris, another video on how to use Google to become Batman, and one retracing Jack Kerouac’s route in “On the Road.”

Parisian Love:

Batman:

Kerouac: