In a complaint filed Thursday, the broadcasters — ABC, Fox, NBC, Allbritton Communications and Telemundo — asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to issue an injunction to stop the service known as Aereokiller from streaming their shows.

Aereokiller, which is available from the website FilmOn, is operated by Alki David, a billionaire who chose the name to tweak Aereo, thehigh profile streaming service backed by media mogul Barry Diller. Here’s a closer look at Aereokiller streaming a live show on NBC:

“It’s nonsense,” David said by phone of the lawsuit. “Since 2010, we’ve been arguing that Filmoon is a virtual cable platform and that we want to pay retransmission fees.”

The new lawsuit is important because it’s part of a great game between the broadcast TV industry and Diller over how and when consumers can watch TV. Aereo won a major victory in April when an appeals court in New York ruled that the service did not infringe copyright because its tiny antenna technology delivers a private stream — rather than a public broadcast — to each subscriber.

Aereo’s victory, however, only carries force in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. And its prospects for expansion have been seriously undercut as a result of a California judge’s decision to shut down Aereokiller on the entire west coast.

The latest lawsuit, then, is part of the TV industry’s effort to gain more ammunition ahead of a likely Supreme Court challenge. The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the story, suggests that the broadcasters likely chose to go after Aereokiller because it is an easier target than Aereo.

Aereo, meanwhile, is going live in Boston this month. CBS has threatened to sue it there too but has yet to make good on the promise. You can read the DC complaint for yourself here:

DC complaint against Aereokiller

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Netflix had announced in April that it wasn’t going to renew its broad licensing deal with Viacom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said at the time that his company was in talks with Viacom to possibly strike separate deals for specific shows. A Netflix spokesperson told us Thursday that the company doesn’t have any news to share on that front.

Netflix’s previous deal with Viacom included titles from Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, VH1, Logo and Spike. In a position paper on the future of his company, Hastings said in April that Netflix was using a whole lot of data to evaluate these kinds of deals before deciding to renew them:

“We might pay, for example, $200,000 for a 4 year exclusive subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) license for a given title. At the time of renewal, we evaluate how much the title has been viewed as well as member rating feedback to determine how much we are willing to pay. How many similar titles we have is also a consideration.”

Netflix doesn’t share any of its ratings with the outside world, but the company has made it clear in the past that kids are a very important audience, which even deserved a dedicated UI to further encourage their viewing. And the company recently added a bunch of additional kids content from Disney Junior to its service.

As for the Viacom fare, it’s possible that there may be hope for Dora or any of the other more popular kids shows to return to the service sooner or later. Fans of Teen Mom on the other hand may have to look elsewhere.

This story was updated at 5:45 pm with a mention of Netflix’s new Disney content.

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This is possibly due to a new feature dubbed auto tagging: Once turned on, Shazam will automatically listen to everything within reach of the iPad’s microphone, generate an acoustic fingerprint every few seconds and ping Shazam’s servers to look for matches. Identified songs, TV shows and ads are automatically sent to a personal queue within the Shazam app.

Users can then browse through these finds, add songs to their favorites, buy them on iTunes or stream them through Rdio. What’s interesting about this feature is that it also works in the background, while you’re doing something in another app or even when the iPad’s lock screen is enabled. iPad users will know that auto tagging is enabled through the red bar on the top of their screen, just like you’re used to seeing when you’re switching to another app during a Skype call.

The red bar means: Shazam is listening. For the next song.

That red bar is meant to warn users that their microphone is recording sound — but Shazam EVP of Marketing David Jones wasn’t all that happy about that notion when I talked to him Wednesday about the app update. “We are not recording or storing anything,” he said, adding that the app was “just borrowing the mic.”

Shazam’s new iPad app is one of a growing number of apps and devices that always keep the microphone running in order to react to speech, or in this case music; others include the new Xbox One. It’s a concept that will make some privacy-conscious consumers nervous — but Jones said that there are huge upsides to this approach.

Instead of making users scramble to find and activate the tagging app on the mobile device, auto tagging will let them come back to the music they heard throughout a TV show, or even at the end of a day. To illustrate it, Jones told me that he had his iPad in the car a few days ago, listening to radio program while he was driving. And when he got to work, he had a full queue of recognized songs waiting for him. “My entire commute’s music was sitting there,” he said.

Aside from auto-tagging, Shazam is also adding TV content recognition, social functionality and a mapping feature that shows where people are listening to which songs. Shazam has retired its old, standalone iPad app and is rolling out the update as a universal app, but the iPhone will only get the mapping feature for now.

Jones said that the iPhone is going to get auto-tagging later this summer. It’s unclear yet when Android is going to see auto-tagging, but other features of the new iPad app will find their way to the tablet version of Android within the next two months.

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Sarandos pointed to Bill Burr as one example of a stand-up comedian who has seen huge success on Netflix, to the point where he can now tour in countries where Netflix is operating its streaming service. Producing stand-up comedy is “also a great way to cultivate talent for future scripted projects,” Sarandos added.

Asked about his plans for the next phase of original shows on Netflix, Sarandos said that he wants to target audiences that the company has so far overlooked, including tweens, Sci-fi fans and sitcom viewers. Altogether, Netflix could debut as many as 16 originals in 2013, according to Sarandos.

In 2013, Netflix is going to launch a total of 8 originals, including the much-anticipated return of Arrested Development, which will premier on Netflix this coming Sunday.

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Soo Meta is the latest product of the Budapest-based online video startup Dragontape, which has also developed a video curation app called Dragontape. After months of testing, the company is now ready to unveil Soo Meta as a new platform for online video storytelling.

Here’s how Soo Meta works: The platform offers content producers and curators an easy way to mix videos with still images, text, links, music, polls and even RSS feeds. The results look like video slideshows, and can range from simple annotations to complex remixes. Take a look below for an example:

There are a few things that I find especially intriguing about Soo Meta: Each story doesn’t just consist of a video, but also a Storify-like story line. Users can either click play to watch the video, or scroll down and browse through the quotes, photos and other elements that make up the story.

The other interesting aspect about Soo Meta is how easy it is to gather media for your video stories. There is a bookmarklet that lets you grab images, videos and quotes from any website. Alternatively, users can manually add Urls to the content they want to use, or even upload their own images to the service. These different elements can then be organized on a timeline, mixed together and annotated.

Playing with Soo Meta is definitely fun, but I also found it challenging to actually decide on the stories I wanted to tell. Thinking out of the box ain’t easy. Still, I could see this become a great tool for online journalists who want to use video in novel ways, or even just annotate third-party videos and put them into context. Even a Storify-like approach of curation of third-party quotes could work great. For example, why not mix highlights of Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal with quotes from journalists who covered the event?

I could also see annotated and visualized podcasts being a big use case, but the makers of Soo Meta have another idea in mind: The company is betting that a combination of online video and polls will bring in whole new audiences. Dragontape co-founder and CEO Tamás Szakál told me that the inspiration for this feature came from teachers using the service. “For them its a really cool way to give more engaging assignments to students,” Szakál said.

He added that it would also be great for bloggers to engage with their audience, and get measurable feedback through analytics. For this, Szakál argued, people will pay. Soo Meta’s freemium model offers advanced polling features and analytics for a monthly fee. Paying users will also get an option to edit stories collaboratively, and share them privately within groups or companies.

So what’s next for Soo Meta? Szakál said that his team of three wants to improve the mobile experience, and strike partnerships to integrate the platform with tools and sites for educators and others. A WordPress plugin is already available, and a full-blown mobile editor is already in the pipeline as well.

An integration into smart TVs is also a possibility. But for now, the company wants to concentrate on perfecting the tools for creators to get people to use it – and hopefully inspire new types of stories. “The goal is of course to make Soo Meta the platform for digital storytelling that makes it a lot easier and faster for teachers, bloggers and journalists to create more engaging experiences,” said Szakál.

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The answer is yes, no, and better get used to it. Microsoft hasn’t actually said how many aspects of the Xbox One are going to work, but the demo it gave at its campus in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday contained some solid hints on the particulars of its voice control. To wake up the device and launch live TV, play a game or do anything at all with it, users will first have to say “Xbox on.”

That’s what people who work on speech recognition call “hot words” – easily recognizable phrases that can be detected by a system without too much effort. Once a user says that magic word or phrase, the actual speech recognition kicks into high gear.

That means that the Xbox One continuously listens for someone to say “Xbox on,” and that everything else that’s spoken is automatically disregarded. Listening for these hot words is done locally and doesn’t require much in terms of system resources. For example, there’s no need to record anything, since all that matters are the hot words. But once those words are uttered, the Xbox One is going to use advanced speech recognition to figure out what users are actually talking about.

Again, Microsoft hasn’t said exactly how this is going to work, but a spokesperson told me that some of the personalization offered by the device is “one of the benefits of Xbox One being connected to and powered by the cloud.” I’d expect that the same is true for speech recognition, much in the same way that Google uploads everything you say to its servers when you use voice search on your Android phone.

The use of hot wording to wake up technology from a state of low-level listening to launch active speech recognition isn’t new. It’s also at work in Google Glass, where users get the device’s attention by saying “okay glass.” Google Now simply uses “Google” as a hot word to launch voice input. And the Xbox 360 starts to accept voice commands once users yell “Xbox” at the device’s Kinect sensor.

The difference between how the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One approach voice recognition isn’t so much about technology, even though Xbox users probably hope that the new iteration is going to work better. What makes people feel uncomfortable is that the Xbox One, and with it its microphone, are meant to be always on.

However, the always-on microphone of the Xbox One is just a sign of things to come. Voice input is going to become a key component of a growing number of internet-connected devices and appliances in your home, car and office, and many of them will use hot words to switch from low-level listening to active speech recognition.

In fact, you are likely looking at one of those devices right now: Laptops, tablets and mobile phones all contain microphones, and they’re all waiting to become hot words-aware any day now. Google just demonstrated how it is going to add hot wording to search on the desktop at last week’s Google I/O conference, allowing users to start a voice search query by simply saying “okay Google” without touching a single button.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that there are no privacy issues around hot wording and always-on microphones. Companies should make it clear how exactly they’re using the technology as it is becoming more widely distributed, and there should always be a way to opt out and rely on alternative input methods. It may also be a good idea to indicate to users  when exactly a device is reverting back from active speech recognition to a state of passive listening. But I’d expect that most consumers quickly get used to the constantly running mic, always listening for those magic words.

Image courtesy of Flickr user visual.dichotomy.

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That would mean that users could sign in with their Flickr and Vimeo accounts within the Settings app on their iOS device, just as they can now with Twitter and Facebook. Then when the user hits the share button in an app, the menu will include the services that they’ve registered.

iOS is expected to be detailed by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. 9to5Mac noted that the decision to include two additional social services could be reversed before any announcement is made. But the report does make a lot of sense.

Such a move could be read as a bit more anti-Google maneuvering from Apple. After all, the company last year shed all iOS-Google tie-ins in iOS 6 with the exception of keeping Google search as the default option in mobile Safari. YouTube is available as a third-party app from the App Store, but it’s no longer the default video service in iOS. Apple could also take up the move to support Vimeo in response to Google allowing iOS developers to enable a setting in their own apps that automatically opens YouTube videos in the YouTube app, instead of mobile Safari.

But it’s also just as likely that Apple is simply increasing feature parity between iOS and Mac OS X. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has built-in Flickr and Vimeo integration, as well as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook integration also began on OS X and moved to iOS, so Yahoo’s photo service and Vimeo’s social video service could be following that same path.

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The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.

Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using closed captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.

“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.

He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.

The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.

There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.

Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.

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Microsoft said that the new device will launch “later this year,” but didn’t give a firm launch date or any information on what the Xbox One will actually cost.

The new device will offer direct access to live TV, which users can start with a simple voice command. The console can switch between games, music, live TV and apps through voice commands as well as through new, universal gestures. For example, to leave a full-screen live TV experience users grab an imaginary floating bar with both hands and then pull these hands together along the bar. It looks like the device will always be on and listening for the phrase “Xbox On” to launch into full-blown voice and gesture recognition.

There is also a so-called snap mode that will overlay an app over live TV to allow side-by-side multitasking. One of the apps taking advantage of this is Microsoft’s Skype, which will offer group video calls on the TV — something that isn’t possible with any other TV-based Skype integration, according to Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. Users can watch a movie and launch a Skype call while the movie continues.

The snap mode can also be used to add contextual information to live TV, something that Microsoft will rolling out with ESPN: Viewes can add a fantasy league widget to live games.But wait, there’s more fantasy football: Microsoft is also partnering with the NFL to bring exclusive, interactive  fantasy football content to the Xbox One as games unfold.

Part of the package is also a live TV guide that is meant to replace the program guide delivered by your cable company. It integrates video-on-demand results and offers users quick access to their favorite TV shows as well as to shows currently trending on TV. The guide looks otherwise like your traditional TV guide grid, but it can be controlled by voice commands throughout.

Microsoft also announced the launch of a live action Halo TV series in cooperation with Steven Spielberg that will add interactive elements to scripted entertainment. “Xbox is about to become the next watercooler,” said Nancy Tellem, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s LA Studios, where the show is being produced.

Hardware-wise, the new device didn’t offer that many surprises: The Xbox One utilizes 8 GB RAM and a yet-unnamed x86 processor. It comes with a Blu-ray drive, and uses Wi-Fi Direct and USB 3 as well as a completely redesigned Kinect sensor device. That’s in line with earlier leaks, which had already pointed to the two HDMI ports, as well as Microsoft using a more PC-like architecture, with an AMD x86-processor powering the device.

Developing story, check back for updates.

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Of course, Microsoft has kept mum on what it is going to announce, but there have been a few leaks and reports that give us a good idea on what the new Xbox is going to offer:

A switch to PC hardware and Windows 8

The next Xbox is going to be based on an x86 processor likely made by AMD (for the specs lovers: there have been reports of an 8-core processor running at 1.6GHz CPU with 4MB of L2 cache), and a pretty powerful GPU to make those next-generation games look good. The device is also supposed to run a special version of Windows 8.

Why that matters: Moving away from ARM and closer to the hardware and software of an ordinary desktop PC should make it easier to develop apps for the platform, which could bring even more entertainment services to the platform. There’s also talk that the next Xbox will allow multitasking, which means you might be able to run Skype while you watch a video on Netflix, or watch TV while you do some casual gaming.

A Blu-ray drive

There have been a number of reports claiming that the next Xbox will come with an integrated Blu-ray player. Microsoft didn’t add a Blu-ray drive to its Xbox 360 game console, and instead opted to offer users the option to buy a drive for the competing HD DVD standard – only to pull out of HD DVD when it became obvious that the format had no chance against Blu-ray.

Why this matters: Blu-ray is a nice add-on for Xbox users who want HD movies without having to deal with yet another box in their living room. But it’s also an admission that physical media will still be around for some time, especially considering that high-quality movie downloads and bandwidth caps don’t mix all that well.

Live TV, courtesy of your cable box

Leaks of key documents about the next Xbox’s hardware have shown that the device will come with two HDMI ports: One to connect the Xbox to your TV, and one to connect your cable box to the Xbox. That’s the same setup used by Google TV and the latest Slingbox, and it allows Microsoft to access your live TV programming and overlay it with its own programming guide, widgets and apps.

Why this matters: Microsoft wants users to always consume TV through the Xbox — even if the actual TV programming comes from traditional cable, and not an Xbox Live app. This shows how important TV has become for the Xbox, but the somewhat cumbersome setup also goes to show how complicated it is for even someone like Microsoft to get access to the content that matters most to consumers.

No little sibling

Last year, rumors surfaced that Microsoft was going to offer two separate Xboxes: A full-blown game console, and a lighter and cheaper device that would focus on video and TV viewing and only offer casual gaming. It now looks like we won’t see that Xbox mini any time soon.

Why this matters: A cheap, and lightweight companion device like the Roku or the Apple TV could be a good way for Microsoft to address new audiences. But getting these devices right is challenging, which is one of the reasons why the existing Xbox 360 and PS3 have been so much more popular than any of the streaming boxes.

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