You might think that Nintendo, beleaguered by falling revenues, minuscule profit and the almost-but-not-quite-failed launch of the Wii U, already has enough problems to worry about.

And you would be wrong, as Nintendo itself set out to demonstrate last week by going out of its way to alienate a bunch of its fans on YouTube.

The fans in question make YouTube "playthrough" videos about, well, video games — features that combine elements of commentary, review, tutorial and walk-through. Some of these commentators reach millions of subscribers, and many support themselves in full or in part by running ads against their videos.

The Empire Strikes Back

This, apparently, Nintendo could not let stand. So last week, the game company began making mass copyright claims on YouTube gameplay videos — in particular, on the the popular "Let's Play" series of playthrough videos. Nintendo did so via YouTube's "Content ID" system, which allows the company to robo-claim ownership of videos that contain footage of its video games.

Nintendo isn't trying to take down the commentary videos. But by asserting copyright, the game company can then run its own ads against the commentaries — and thus, of course, deprive the video creators of revenue.

In effect, Nintendo has put those video creators on notice that, while it will tolerate them for now, it won't let them make money from their efforts. It doesn’t matter if the post is a detailed review, a think piece on the art style, or a tutorial for a difficult level, all of which involve a substantial additional effort on the part of the video creator. Insofar as Nintendo, is concerned, any ad revenue those efforts raised now belongs to... Nintendo.

Nintendo released this statement to the gaming-news site Gamefront last week:

As part of our on-going push to ensure Nintendo content is shared across social media channels in an appropriate and safe way, we became a YouTube partner and as such in February 2013 we registered our copyright content in the YouTube database. For most fan videos this will not result in any changes, however, for those videos featuring Nintendo-owned content, such as images or audio of a certain length, adverts will now appear at the beginning, next to or at the end of the clips. We continually want our fans to enjoy sharing Nintendo content on YouTube, and that is why, unlike other entertainment companies, we have chosen not to block people using our intellectual property.

For more information please visit http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/faq.html

ReadWrite also contacted Nintendo for comment. A spokeperson replied that the company is "looking into" the mass copyright claims, but offered no further statement.

Mass Unhappiness Ensues 

Let's put this simply: Nintendo's move is one of the most egregious marketing mistakes ever committed by a major video-game company. It is going to come back to bite Nintendo. Hard.       

Playthrough videos such as Let’s Play do a lot to fuel the commercial videogame complex, every bit as much as magazines and blogs. With their ad revenue diverted to Nintendo, however, these Internet-famous gamers have no commercial incentive to play, or talk in-depth about, any Nintendo games ever again.

Some are already boycotting Nintendo. Take, for instance, Zack Scott, a prolific creator of Let's Play videos:

Since I started my gaming channel, I've played a lot of games. I love Nintendo, so I've included their games in my line-up. But until their claims are straightened out, I won't be playing their games. I won't because it jeopardizes my channel's copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers.

Dozens of videos by angry gamers have started to populate the site, and comment sections across YouTube are exploding.

"I've bought, played and enjoy several games simply because I heard about them and saw gameplay on YouTube," one individual using the pseudonym TelaranRogue wrote in the comments to a new anti-Nintendo video (titled, cleverly enough, "Nintendo Hates YouTubers"). "With this move, Nintendo just killed their chance of getting sales from me."

"I think Nintendo really took a crap on themselves in doing this," wrote "robert letourneau" in comments to the IGN video "Let's Not Play Nintendo Games."

Nintendo's Self-Inflicted Headshot

Shaun Spalding, a former attorney at New Media Rights, argues that Nintendo is really only harming itself. “[G]ameplay videos generate consumer buzz (so much so that game publishers actually pay some high-level Youtubers lots of money just to start ‘Let's Playing’ their games)," he told me in email. "Both the PS4 and Xbox have built-in capabilities that help gamers upload videos to the Internet, but Nintendo has moved in the opposite direction."

It's not even clear that Nintendo's copyright claims are justified (although they're likely to stand unless successfully challenged in court). Some critics argue that playthrough videos should qualify for the "fair use" exception to copyright because they don't incorporate the entirety of the original game and also add a substantial amount of new creative material in the form of commentary, gameplay tips and the like.

As gaming commentator "Totalbiscuit" pointed out in his video on the topic:

[B]ecause you actually play the game yourself, and you do so in a different way, you transform the work in some respect. It becomes yours, it becomes unique.

Too bad Nintendo doesn't see it that way. At least it's first in line to suffer from its short-sighted decision. Unfortunately, its fans are queued up right behind it.

Image screencapped from YouTube video "Let's Play Donkey Kong Country 2" by Cobanermani456

Shazam, an app best known for identifying songs playing around you, is making a big move into identifying all kinds of media playing around you.

That promises to move Shazam from our pockets, where its smartphone apps mostly identify songs, to our living rooms—and hence to the tablets we typically keep near our TVs. Those tablets are becoming known as "second screens"—and Shazam wants to have a big presence on them.

The most intriguing aspect of Shazam's latest version is its added capability to tag events on live TV in the U.S., a clear sign that Shazam wants to be the gateway app for second-screen use. As you watch a TV show, Shazam can listen and identify it, revealing information about the show and linking to related content. Commercials will be tagged as well, giving advertisers another channel to reach you.

iPad users will also now get to use auto-tagging and lyrics delivered through Shazam's LyricPlay system. Those features were previously available on other platforms, but not the iPad version.

The social aspects of the new version of the app are not to be ignored. The home screen on the iPad app will have real-time updates on what shows and songs people find popular. Shazam users on both iPhones and iPads will now be able to explore a map of tagged music, presumably to discover what the people around them like.

Shazam for iOS 6.0.0 on the iPad

Playing around with the app today, I found most of the features worked as advertised, though there was a period where the app's tagging did not work—the app thought I wasn't connected to the Internet. (I was.) Live TV tagging picked up very quickly—though it does need to be live, I discovered. Some shows I have on Amazon Prime didn't get tagged when played back on my Roku player.

I appreciated Shazam's integration with Rdio, the streaming-music service, but if I wanted to connect to Spotify (or Pandora), I would have to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Encore edition.

Beyond the new features for iPad users, the new version of Shazam offers a sneak peek into a potential future of online entertainment: a strong blend of social and multimedia content designed to make us forget the time when we ever watched TV through a single, lonely screen.

If the Xbox One is the future of gaming, then that future is as grim as everyone feared.

In an event Tuesday morning that felt like a casual bar conversation compared to Sony's brain-exploding extravaganza back in February, Microsoft unveiled the next-gen Xbox — not in a giant conference center, but in a tent set up on a soccer field at its Redmond campus.

With a hard-line focus on the One's television connectivity and a smart decision to actually show off the physical console, Microsoft pulled off a tight one-hour presentation that glazed over the trickier undercurrents at play. But the devil is in the details, and it's now apparent that while the Xbox One will not require a constant Internet connection [Note: this point is now in dispute - see update further down], as many had feared, it's still the most restrictive console ever made.

(See also: Sim City Launch Disaster Should Kill Online-Only DRM)

As the event highlighted, the One is an aggressive grab for the living room from the get-go. But for gamers, long the core market for the Xbox, two really important questions remain. How much of the hardware we buy do we really own, and how far can and should a manufacturer go in telling us how to use our console?

Microsoft drew some very serious lines in the sand today. It's up to consumers to decide whether or not to play ball. 

Microsoft's Iron Grip

The rumor of a universal always-online requirement was finally quelled, but even more mysterious news boiled up in its place. Microsoft openly revealed that the One will require users to download all games to the console's hard drive to play, but Wired's Chris Kohler reported that to do this a second time with the same disc will require a player to pay an unspecified fee.

(See also: Xbox One: Microsoft's Big Bid To Pwn The Living Room)

Microsoft quickly responded by saying that the Xbox One will "enable customers to trade in and resell games" and that the company will have more details to share later, likely at the Electronic Entertainment Expo next month. But the same spokesperson also added this ominous note in a comment to the game-news site Polygon:

Xbox One’s support for used games and these other scenarios may not look like they have on previous console generations, and that’s what we’ll be explaining as soon as we’re able.

That's as clear as mud, of course. But tacking on fees for re-using an already-purchased game disk could seriously damage the used game market, or even kill it entirely. Not only would used games get more complicated to rebundle and price, resellers would likely offer less for used games in the first place.

That would antagonize retailers and consumers alike. It would be a giant step backward in an era where a game that provides maybe 8-10 hours of gameplay will still cost $60. Such a policy could even boomerang on game developers themselves, since many gamers finance their purchase of new games by trading in their old ones. If the trade-in market vanishes, so does that source of cash for new purchases.

The good news here is that a used game fee was "a surprise" to GameStop President Tony Bartel when he spoke to Polygon. Bartel went on to call the fee requirement "speculation." In a separate statement to ReadWrite, the company replied, "GameStop is working closely with Microsoft to ensure there is an opportunity for customers to take advantage of our popular buy-sell-trade model and provide a seamless transition for consumers to enjoy the next generation of console gaming." 

(See also: Xbox One Photo Gallery)

While the Xbox One will be able to operate without an Internet connection, the always-online issue won't go away entirely. Microsoft announced that it will be handing that ability over to publishers, who can designate certain game functions that will only work on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform — in other words, effectively requiring an Internet connection to play.

This isn't great news, especially considering Electronic Arts took the stage at the One unveiling. EA, voted the worst company in America two years in a row, recently tried to play nice with its consumer base by discontinuing its insane Online Pass program, which charged gamers a fee to access some online levels or items via a used game disk. But you can bet the company will be near the front of the line when it comes time to bake core game functions into the cloud to make an online-only gaming world an unavoidable, and unpleasant, reality.  

Say Goodbye To Your Current Collection

So what about that huge library of Xbox 360 games you've collected so far? Sorry, those won't work on the One. (PlayStation 3 games won't work on Sony's upcoming console, either, so there's plenty of blame to go around on this front.)

But what about all those awesome indie games you've downloaded through Xbox Live Marketplace or the full 360 titles you bought digitally? Those will carry over, right? Nope. It turns out that only music, movies, and TV shows purchased through Xbox Live will follow you to the One. [Note: Microsoft's Don Mattrick has responded to this aspect - see update further down].

Then there's the Kinect. While it sports very impressive voice recognition and motion control, reports quickly surfaced that the updated camera-sensor combo will need to be plugged in at all times to use the One. For starters, that's both annoying and a bit creepy, considering the Kinect will be on all the time watching everything you do. But this bit of news also suggests that the One itself might be pretty pricey, if it comes with the next-generation Kinect bundled.

Your Move, Sony

To be sure, Sony's PlayStation 4 could be equally bad, or even worse; we won't know until Sony really unveils it at E3 next month. For the moment, though, Sony at least stands a chance of offering a more consumer-friendly future for console gaming.

Is it inevitable that both the software and hardware we buy in the gaming realm, be it the new SimCity or the next-gen Xbox, are simply no longer ours to own, let alone to hack and mod and use in the way we're most comfortable? Microsoft may not have come out and said so outright, but it's certainly taken quite a few steps down that gloomy manufacturer- and publisher-dominated road.

Updated 10:15am on 5/22: When asked directly by Kotaku whether or not the Xbox One would have a time limit on its ability to play games offline, Microsoft Vice President Phil Harrison offered these fateful words: 

Kotaku: If I’m playing a single player game, do I have to be online at least once per hour or something like that? Or can I go weeks and weeks?

Harrison: I believe it’s 24 hours.

Kotaku: I’d have to connect online once every day.

Harrison: Correct.

The company immediately backpedaled on Harrison's statement, telling Polygon Wednesday morning that the comments represent only "potential scenarios," adding, "...we have not confirmed any details today, nor will we be."

Updated 11:40am on 5/22: When asked about backwards compatibility by The Wall Street Journal, Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, said that only 5% of customers play old games on a new system and developing technology to accommodate those players was not worth it. “If you’re backwards compatible, you’re really backwards,” Mattrick added.

Photos by ReadWrite's Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

Today in Redmond, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, its vision for the future of home entertainment. The Xbox One will expand Microsoft's Xbox agenda well beyond gaming, blurring the boundaries of gaming and interactive TV further than ever.

Let's take a look.

The Xbox One isn't much of a departure when it comes to design — but the tech under the hood is on steroids and then some.

With integrated Blu-Ray, Kinect and a whole new batch of hyper-responsive voice and gesture controls, Microsoft is angling for casual gamers and the hardcore set alike.

Microsoft's "futureproof" Xbox One features a reimagined (but not wholly reinvented) controller with developer-programmable buttons and "vibrating impulse triggers" that provide tactile feedback.

The Xbox One soaking up the spotlight... literally.

Microsoft hosted its Xbox One event in a tent at the center of at its Redmond, Washington Xbox campus.

Don Mattrick takes the stage for the biggest reveal moment of the day: the name of Microsoft's new console.

If the Today Show is any indication, the Xbox ain't just for l33t gamers these days — it's a console designed for the whole family.

Microsoft's new Xbox Live design takes after the successful formula of its predecessor rather than reinventing the wheel.

The Xbox One's multitasking chops on display, featuring a live Skype video chat demo.

With a demo of Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Xbox One, FPS fans are in understandable throes of ecstasy today. The new shooter will take the hit franchise in a new direction, setting the player up as the underdog in a ragtag team of post-apocalyptic warriors, who are presumably ghost-like in some capacity.

Since we can only assume that a handful of gamers out there won't be so into the Today Show thing, Forza Motorsport 5 will launch with the Xbox One.

The Xbox One may have made its photo op, but one big question remains: price. With so many advanced features on board, it's hard to imagine that the console will be able to match the $299 bill of its predecessor's base model. If Microsoft really wants to stave off the competition when the console becomes available—"later this year," executives said—the Xbox One's price tag needs to be as impressive as its spec sheet.

Photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

It's not every day one of the big three gaming powerhouses announces a new console. In fact, we've been waiting a solid eight years. In an event on its Redmond, Washington home turf today, Microsoft announced the Xbox One, its next generation Xbox gaming console — and more.

In fact, the Xbox One is pretty much an audacious land grab by Microsoft, an attempt to stake out your living room as its undisputed turf. Here's how.

The new console packs 8GB of RAM, a base 500GB hard drive, USB 3.0, wi-fi direct, and built-in Blu-Ray. The One runs on a custom eight-core AMD chip and will come bundled with Kinect, the motion-based controller system that Microsoft introduced with the Xbox 360.

 

Contrary to rumors, the Xbox One will not require an Internet connection at all times. Though it may crimp your ability to play used games and apparently won't play Xbox 360 games at all. 

 

On stage in Redmond, Head of Xbox Don Mattrick touted the Xbox team's ability to stay agile with trends — not always the company's strong suit — by feeding the voracious appetite of avid gamers. "Nearly 8 years after our launch, the Xbox 360 remains a vibrant platform," Mattrick said. "We made an early bet on Xbox live. Gamers were hungry to adopt emerging technologies... we doubled down on Xbox Live. Today it's time for technology to step behind the curtain."

But it is in the living room that the Xbox One stakes its major claim to fame. A new generation of Xbox Live will be the revamped, beating heart of the console, weaving together interactive TV, real-time major broadcast events like sports and awards shows and connected gaming, naturally.

The new Xbox Live interface enables quick-switching between Xbox Live's homescreen, movies and live TV — and in the demo, quick meant quick. ""You can switch to your game like it's a TV channel flip" according to Xbox Live head Marc Whitten. The quick-switching is thanks to "snap mode," a multitasking feature that allows apps to remain running in the background so that they can pop back up instantly.

By hosting its own event on its own terms, Microsoft is jumping the gun on E3 — the biggest North American gaming conference, and traditional grounds for big, flashy hardware announcements. Of course, Microsoft is also beating Sony to the punch, considering that the rival's PlayStation 4 reveal is just around the corner too. 

All photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

As predicted, Google unveiled its own all-you-can-stream music subscription service to compete with Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and MOG. It's a crowded space with challenging economics, but if anybody is well-positioned to win this game, it's Google. 

Google Play Music All Access will offer on-demand access to millions of songs for $9.99 per month, which is the same as every other music subscription service's premium tier. Unlike the existing market leaders, though, All Access won't include a free tier of access, a fact originally reported by the New York Times.

All Access will include "millions" — Google didn't say how many — of songs within 22 genres, a Google-powered recommendation engine, Pandora-style radio stations, editor-curated playlists and the ability to blend your own library with Google's. 

At first glance, it's a pretty compelling offering. If you sign up before the end of June, it will cost $7.99 per month. And that's just the first competitive advantage Google has over the incumbents. 

Google Is Already A Streaming Music Giant

Spotify is virtually synonymous with streaming music, but it's worth noting that Google is already plays a massive role in the discovery and consumption of music. These days, when teenagers want to hear a new song, they don't turn on the radio or buy a CD. They go to YouTube.

That's because the Internet's biggest repository of videos also happens to host millions of songs, which are readily available to stream for free. It's the world's biggest accidental music streaming service. 

With All Access, Google is making a far more official foray into  the streaming music space, having recently signed licensing deals with all three major labels in the U.S. It's not linked directly to YouTube and its massive repository of free music, but rumor has it that the video giant could get its own paid subscriptions for on-demand music. In the meantime, All Access is another attractive gateway into Google's content ecosystem, which hosts a hell of a lot of music. 

Google's Biggest Advantage: Being Google

The only reason we're talking about this new music service is because of who made it. By virtue of being a Google product, All Access has the potential for massive cross-promotion throughout Google's array of popular Web services.

More important, All Access will be built directly into the world's most popular mobile operating system. That's where the magic of streaming music really lies: In our ability to take it with us. It's why Spotify, Rdio and MOG all wager that the simple ability to access all that music on our phone is enough to convince people to shell out $10 per month. Spotify has done a decent job of proving that thesis by amassing 6 million paid subscribers at an impressive 25% conversion rate. 

Of course, Spotify, like Rdio and the rest of its competitors, has to compete for users' attention via app store rankings, social integrations and plain old marketing. All Access, by contrast will be much more front-and-center within the Android ecosystem. That's huge.

Who Needs A Business Model? 

Another advantage of being a Google product is that All Access won't have quite as much pressure to make money. Spotify and Rdio will ultimately need to find a way to profitability (or get acquired by a giant), something that isn't easy under the current economics of the streaming music business.

A company like Spotify will have to find a way to minimize its enormous music licensing costs, which are easily its biggest expense. Google's entrance into this space might make that harder, since the company can afford to pay out huge sums without investors holding the profitability gun to its head. 

Spotify and Rdio's other biggest challenge is converting paid subscribers. The streaming model, the theory goes, will work much better when there are many millions of people paying for services like this.

So far, Spotify has done the best job of converting those free listeners to paying subscribers. But with a competitively price competing service now shipping on hundreds of millions of handsets, the incumbents may have to get much more creative about courting subscribers. 

In a recent interview on WYNC's On the Media, technology journalist Tim Carmody suggested that this might be how the streaming music business will work:

Probably the most likely thing that will happen is that someone, whether it's an Apple or a Google or an Amazon or a Sony, comes along and essentially agrees that we’re gonna run music at a loss and we’re going to support it with these other businesses. How do you make money on the music business? Don't make money on the music business. That's the answer to that question.

That may well turn out to be true, but it's probably not quite what Spotify, Rdio and their ilk had in mind. 

All Access: Merge Your Library With Google's 

Last week, I wrote that as good as Spotify and Rdio both are, neither is perfect. Spotify's user experience could be better, while Rdio doesn't let its users upload or merge their own music. What I described as the ultimate streaming service would need to nail both design and music selection, at the very least. From the Google I/O stage, the All Access interface certainly looked nice, although I have yet to get my hands on it to try it out.  

The second part of that equation — the ability merge one's own library with a cloud-based repository of music - appears to be a feature that All Access subscribers will indeed enjoy. By launching alongside the Google Music cyberlocker first unveiled in 2011, All Access effectively allows users to blur the line between Google's library of licensed music and their own collection of tunes. 

One detail that was glossed over at Google I/O was exactly how wide of a selection All Access users will have. Rdio and Spotify both have about 20 million tracks in their libraries, which includes not just the major labels, but a partnership with indie label rights body Merlin and countless smaller labels. How many tracks does All Access have? The Google Music integration makes that question a little less crucial, but more casual listeners without hard drives full of MP3s will want to know when they're eyeing up $10 music services. 

Related Stories

• Why Google's Rumored Spotify-Killer Makes Perfect Sense
• 6 Million People Pay For Spotify - Is That Good Enough? 
• Next Round In The Google-Amazon Death Match: Streaming Music
• The Ultimate Streaming Music Service: Just Merge Rdio and Spotify

Images by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

The Verge, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are all reporting that Google will launch a streaming-music service at its Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday. 

While Google hasn't commented, according to the reports Google has already struck licensing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment - it already has a deal with Warner Music Group. 

No word on pricing yet, but the Times said that there would be no "free" tier of service. The new service is expected to be accessed via the Google Play store for Android devices, but Google is also said to be working on a streaming-music product for its YouTube division. 

Details are expected to be announced at the Google I/O keynote on Wednesday. 

After a longer-than-expected wait, some shipping glitches, and a good deal of anticipation, my open-source, crowd-funded, cloud-gaming, Android-powered Ouya game console arrived in Friday's mail. I unpacked the box, plugged it in, and fired it up. After 24 hours, I've come to some conclusions about the device – though I can't say they're all positive.

(See also Can Startup Ouya's Crowd-Sourced Gaming Console Challenge Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo?)

Ouya: Out Of The Box

The Console: The first thing I noticed about the console itself was its size. The thing is small – about the size of a Rubik's Cube. With no optical drive or expansion slots, there's no reason for the device to be any bigger, but it was still a little jarring. It's also pretty idiot-proof. Plug in the included power adapter and HDMI cable, press the only button on the device, and you're ready to get started. 

The Controller: The controller was reputed to be the system's crown jewel, and overall, it's a success. The pop-off panels for accessing the dual battery compartments seem a little insecure at first, and I would have preferred a more traditional hinged compartment on the back, but the Ouya design seems rigid enough once everything is snapped together, and it's probably cheaper to fix, down the line.

Other than that, the pad, sticks and buttons worked as planned, the controller fit my average-sized hand nicely, and I was able to forget about controls and focus on the games immediately. And that's really the point. I found it worlds more comfortable than any Sony controller, and somewhat more natural than the Xbox 360's. If this controller shipped with a next-gen system, I wouldn't be upset.

Ouya Setup

The hardware was great, and pairing the controllers was straightforward. When I logged into my account, though, the Ouya's Kickstarter roots started to show. Setup went smoothly enough, but even a little documentation might have been nice. The box included only an FCC-mandated warning: no manual or diagrams. The log in process was simple, but to retrieve the username I'd registered months ago, I had to swap to my laptop and Google "Ouya username retrieval." An inline "Retrieve Username" next to the "Lost Password" link in the setup screen wouldn't have been terribly hard to add.

With any luck, that retail units will ship with more documentation and a smoothed-out interface. As an early backer, a reviewer and someone who'd like to see this type of project succeed, I didn't really care, but the Best Buy set is accustomed to a higher level of hand-holding.  

The Ouya UI

Once you're logged in, the Ouya interface is pretty clean, but there aren't too many more positives worth noting. It's tough to make four menu items a jumble, but Ouya somehow succeeded. The designers may have been trying a bit too hard to make things cool.

The menu items:

PLAY: Play the games you’ve downloaded. Simple enough.

DISCOVER:  This is the Ouya app store. DISCOVER is a horribly awkward list of downloadable games, with confusingly named sub-menus (What’s the difference between CHECK IT, STAFFPICKS, and FAVS, anyway?). The GENRES section is more useful, but it reveals an unfortunate lack of content designed for the device. As of the weekend, there were only six games in the DUAL STICK category and only three applications in APPS.

MAKE: Information for software developers that really doesn’t belong in a main menu.

MANAGE: System configuration.

I get what Ouya was going for, but everything abut the interface screams BETA, and it wouldn't have been that hard to do it right. Drop me straight into PLAY, provide a prominent link to the store, and link to games that are related to the one I'm currently playing. Hide the rest somewhere boring. Done.

Some of the gaps should get filled when more titles become available, but that list is likely to to see a lot of static. The bar is pretty low for Android games, so not every entry will be up to par for console games.

That's where some content curation could help. Branded channels (e.g., something by IndieCade or one of the gaming mags) could really help users find games worth playing. So could a healthy peer rating system and some filtering based on past ratings. The good news is that all of this can be fixed in software. The bad news is that the retail release date is coming up fast.

(See also Android Gaming Console Ouya Set To Ship At End Of June.)

Ouya Games

Final Fantasy III: What about Final Fantasy III? If you've played the Android version on other devices, you know what you're getting. If you played the original version 20 years ago, it's a refreshing trip down memory lane. FFIII offers Game Boy mechanics with 3D graphics: think Pokemon Stadium on the N64 compared to Pokemon Yellow and Red. Younger gamers without an appreciation of history will probably get bored very fast. It's great to see a major studio throw some weight behind the Ouya, but this game is not a kingmaker. 

The Ouya Verdict

I think the gaming industry needs a kick in the pants, and I'm glad to have helped support the Ouya's attempt to provide it. I have hopes that in time, the Ouya can provide exposure to indie game developers, add playability to Android games that could really use a solid controller and function as a valid over-the-top box for Netflix and other TV apps.

As a geek and freedom fighter, I think my money was well-spent. If I were a parent on a shopping mission or hardcore gamer looking for a fix, though, the Ouya just doesn't deliver. If you're looking for anything resembling a AAA-title gaming experience, your $99 would be better spent on a used Xbox 360 or a new video card for your gaming computer.

I think Ouya has the potential to fix the bugs and round out its stable of apps and games to make a really viable complement to traditional consoles, but the company needs to move fast, before gamers decide to move on.

Science fiction movies should help illuminate our path forward - and lay bare the implications of present-day technologies, good and bad. All too often, however, sci-fi movies get the future all wrong. This includes some of our most cherished favorites.

Consider all the flicks featuring flying cars, poorly conceived time travel escapades, sex with aliens or heroes that are either willfully ignorant of present-day technology or savant-like in their ability to manipulate it into doing things it most certainly could never do. How then to select the 10 most worthy of this dubious honor?

Let me defer to popular cyber-punk author William Gibson, who famously stated: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." This may be the single most misguided statement about the future ever made. Over and over again the future takes its sweet time arriving, but when it does come it changes everything in unanticipated ways.

Therefore, I'm zeroing in on movies that predicted our scary-glorious future would arrive soon fairly soon, but which instead got everything spectacularly confused. As these 10 glorious misses prove, that's easy enough to do.

On to the show:  

1. Blade Runner

Please forgive me. I love Blade Runner. But it's comically wrong, pretty much about everything. Replicants? Androids on the cusp of being indistinguishable from humans? Memory implants? Colonies on Mars? A "city of 106 million people." A one-world culture that appears to be dominated by Japan but looks like Hong Kong. Crappy phones? Oh, and what's the deal with all that rain in California? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

2. Jurassic Park

If you can get past the cheesy acting and pap dialogue, Jurassic Park is good Spielbergian fun. But it's so off target. A rich man spends figures out how to recreate extinct species and the best application he can come up with a dinosaur theme park? Let's get this straight: this will never happen, not in any future.

Yes, I know... there's no Superman, either. Problem is, this film spends an inordinate amount of time trying to justify its science - and gets it wrong.

3. Brazil 

Terrorists. Excessive cosmetic surgery. Police state. Too many damn tubes and wires? The brilliant Brazil got much right - but was wrong on so many core elements. Ours is not a dystopian world where we are all faceless numbers, easily lost by an overarching, all-encompassing bureaucracy. Just the opposite, in fact. Increasingly, the world is an all-out competition for attention amongst billions of people striving to transcend anonymity. Everything about Brazil is backwards-looking. Worse, it completely missed how everything is going digital.

4. Videodrome

After watching Videodrome many times, I'm still not entirely sure what it's about. Here's my best guess: Cable television tells us what to watch, and as we watch we become changed - emotionally and physically. Um, perhaps. But it seems to me that the Internet is putting us more in control of what we watch, not the other way around.

With all our "second screens" - smartphones and tablets - plus YouTube, the Web and social media, there is never a shortage of personalized content. And most of it won't kill you, at least not right away. Ironically, television has become far less important to us than Videodrome would have ever thought possible.

5. Soylent Green

Spoiler alert: Soylent Green is people!

The world is so over-populated, resources so scarce, that what choice does poor Soylent Industries have but to make its foodstuff from humans? Except, that's not what happened. So far, the future has brought relative abundance - which has its own set of problems. 

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

If you manage to stay awake through 2001 - no small feat in 2013 - you come to realize how wrong it is about everything. Alien contact, stately flights to the moon and a super-intelligence that is a... mainframe.

Sadly, 2001 spawned far too many copycat films with its silly singular view: Humans are not in charge of their past nor their future. The fact that the women are stewardesses and anyone who can do anything is a white male merely reveals just how clueless this film really was. On the plus side, it still looks and sounds awesome.

7. Fahrenheit 451

There is much good to say about Julie Christie and Francois Truffaut. But you cannot say this movie understood the future. In Fahrenheit 451, a firefighter burns books. This is his duty - because the "government" cannot allow books as they may foster an independent-minded populace.

Whenever this movie comes on, I download one of the thousands of free books that are instantly available to me via Kindle.

8. Inception

Infiltrating someone's unconscious mind. Stealing another's dreams. Controlling what others do by getting inside their head, all Bene Gesserit like? Inception may be cool, and it's certainly frustrating. But we are nowhere close to accomplishing what the film suggests. We can't even cure Alzheimer's. 

9. Logan's Run

In Logan's Run, life is perfect. And then you die. At the ripe old age of 30.

It may not be fair to include this film on the list. After all, it's set 250 years from now. Who knows what will happen in that time? However, given the fact that humanity continues to live longer, spends billions of dollars on extending life, and brilliant scientists such as Ray Kurzweil are actively pursuing a sort-of human-technological immortality through the singularity, I am going to go out on a limb and predict that Logan's Run will always be wrong.

10. Frankenstein

We can now keep people alive by putting inside them the organs of a dead person(s) - or an animal. Does that make the recipient a monster? Frankenstein warned what could happen when we attempt to bring the dead to life, or create a life from the dead. Whether or not we figure out how to do that - it isn't going to play out like Frankenstein.

Those are my choices, and I'll stand behind every one. But these 10 misfires are far from the only movies that completely whiffed on predicting the future. What films would you add to the list? Leave your comments below.

The unofficial leaders of the streaming-music market, Rdio and Spotify, are both awfully good services. But neither is close to perfect, which led me to wonder just how you'd create the ultimate online music service.

The answer isn't hard: Just merge Spotify and Rdio. Alternatively, the two sites should just copiously steal features from one another. Or someone could found a new service that blends the best of both. Whatever. I want the best of both, and I want it now.

Allow me to explain. Almost two years ago, when Spotify finally launched in the U.S., I signed up. Within 48 hours, I had canceled my Rdio subscription and agreed to pay Spotify $10 per month to access its service on my phone, ad-free. 

(See Also: How To Choose The Right Music Subscription Service)

But for the last few weeks, I've had the luxury of using a premium Rdio demo account, and I've gotta say: It's sometimes tempting to switch back. As impressive as Spotify is, Rdio is much, much better designed. On the other hand, Spotify has a few excellent features Rdio lacks. (Both sites offer approximately the same amount of music, which is often available via high-quality 320 kbps streams.)

Frankly, I'm torn. But I'd rather not have to choose at all. I suspect many other music fans — whether they know it or not — feel the same way.

What Rdio Gets Right: Design and Music Management

When it comes to design, Rdio wins, hands down. Spotify's apps aren't terrible, but Rdio sports what feels like a cleaner, more minimalist design. The blue and white color scheme is more refreshing and it feels like the company put some thought into typography. 

More importantly, Rdio organizes your music much, much better than Spotify does. It has long blown my mind that Spotify refuses to display your music library in a way that's at all analogous to how you'd organize music in real life. There's no collection. There is no "Albums" tab.  It's just playlists, starred tracks and search. If I find a new album I want to routinely listen to, I have to star the whole thing or add it as a playlist. It's bizarre. 

By contrast, Rdio lets me easily add albums to what is intuitively labeled my "Collection," which is organized by artist. To anybody who's ever used an iPod, scrolling through a list of artists is an familiar, almost expected interface. Spotify users, for whatever reason, don't have this simple luxury. 

Rdio's built-in music discovery is also superior. The "Heavy Rotation" tab recommends music to me based on what I listen to and who I follow on Rdio. Depending on those two details (especially who one chooses to follow), the suggestions can actually be pretty spot-on. I don't know what powers the "Recommended Albums" carousel in Spotify's "What's New" tab, but the fact that it thinks I'd enjoy Kelly Clarkson's new album suggests it's not paying very much attention.

What Spotify Gets Right: Add-On Apps & Infinite Music

What Spotify lacks in native recommendation features it makes up for via third party add-ons available through its built-in app platform. Spotify might not be aware of what I actually like, but Last.fm is — and its Spotify app is a mere click away. If I want music to match my mood, there's MoodAgent, which builds playlists based on things like tempo and the emotional qualities of a given song. 

For less robotic, more human-curated recommendations, there are apps like Hype Machine and Shuffler.fm, both of which corral the best new stuff from influential music blogs, broken down by genre. Then there are good, old-fashioned hand-picked recommendations from individual critics via the Rolling Stone, Guardian, Pitchfork or NME apps. 

Spotify's third party app platform is by far its most promising feature, aside from the music itself. Realizing that it can't build the end-all, be-all music service for every listener, Spotify has smartly opened up its platform to developers, who can use HTML5 and related Web technologies to build applications that plug into Spotify's vast music library.

These add-ons have yet to find their way into Spotify's mobile apps, but they continue to push the desktop experience forward in a way that makes it hard to break the Spotify habit. 

And Another Spotify Win: Imports

The other chief advantage Spotify offers — and that Rdio and others should just steal outright — is the ability to import your own MP3 collection into the service. This is a huge perk.

No matter how many licensing deals these companies strike, their music libraries are never going to include everything. There will always be big-name holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, not to mention a score of smaller, independent artists who either haven't done the leg work to get their music onto streaming services or simply don't want to. 

Allowing users to effectively merge their personal music collections with Spotify's music library makes for an experience that feels more comprehensive and focused. As more of our music consumption moves online, the listening experience inevitably becomes fractured across sites and apps. We might not be able to avoid this entirely, but Spotify's integrated approach makes it easier to at least minimize the problem.  

There are, as always, technical limitations to implementing this feature. Since Spotify primarily exists as a desktop app, it can easily scan your hard drive for music tracks and index them, iTunes-style. The alternative would be to allow users to upload their tracks directly to the service, a la Google Music and the Amazon Cloud Player.

Waiting for thousands of songs to upload doesn't present the most compelling user experience, but it is one possible technical solution. For the most part, Spotify's local indexing approach works pretty well. 

Rdio has desktop apps, but they're more or less a clone of its Web interface without much extra functionality tacked on. If Rdio were to include the ability to import and manage music, I'd be that much closer to ditching Spotify. The desktop app is also a crucial component to syncing local MP3s to users' phones and tablets, another feature unique to Spotify in the U.S. (Deezer does this, too). 

Toward The Ultimate Streaming Service

Music is a pretty personal thing. If these companies want us to shift our listening habits into their respective clouds, they need to be particularly sensitive to what works for users. I've presented one framework here. Perhaps you have your own ideas, which I encourage you to leave in the comments. A flawlessly-designed, super-comprehensive, extensible and flexible music subscription service would be well worth the money. 

It's a little frustrating, because Spotify and Rdio collectively have most of the pieces required to build the ultimate streaming service. It's almost as if the two could merge and we'd be set. It'd be unlikely, but if this new hybrid music dream service could steal a page from Tomahawk's playbook and integrate additional music sources like SoundCloud and YouTube, it'd be even better. 

Whether or not Rdio, Spotify or any of its current direct competitors deliver this mythical dream service, somebody will. The music subscription space is going to heat up substantially this year, as Google and Amazon are both rumored to be entering this market. Meanwhile, MOG will be reborn as Daisy and Deezer is expected to launch in the U.S. 

We already have a few very awesome, yet imperfect music subscription services. As the space gets more crowded, there exists a real opportunity to launch something truly, thoroughly compelling. Who will it be? 

Eager gamers have a new date to look forward to: June 25. That's the day that the much-anticipated OUYA gaming console is set to begin shipping to consumers that have been waiting since last summer to try out the newest gaming platform running Google's Android mobile operating system.

[See Also: Ouya Is Finally Set To Ship To The Game Console's Backers]

OUYA set the Internet on fire last year when it began as a crowd funded Kickstarter campaign, blowing past expectations to raise $8.6 million dollars in funds to bring Android games to TV sets. Today the company announced that is going big. OUYA landed $15 million in funding from a variety of venture capital and technology companies, including NVIDIA and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

[See Also: Can Startup Ouya's Crowd-Sourced Gaming Console Challenge Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo?]

The funding will help OUYA scale to meet what has become massive demand for the console. This is the second time this year that shipments of OUYA have been delayed. Most Kickstarter backers were supposed to see their consoles arrive on March 28 and will now have to wait just a bit longer. 

[See Also: From Kickstarter to Target: Indie Ouya Gets Mainstream Retail Partners]

"The message is clear: people want OUYA.  We first heard this from Kickstarter backers who provided more than $8 million to help us build OUYA, then from over 12,000 developers who have registered to make an OUYA game, next from retailers who are carrying OUYA online and soon on store shelves, and now from top pioneering investors," said OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman.

Are you awaiting your OUYA? Are you planning on building games for the console? Let us know in the comments. 

Online television offers a truly dizzying array of choices. Viewers of services like Hulu and Netflix, as well as customers of iTunes and Amazon Digital Services, can stream, rent or purchase episodes of television shows from every era.

But not every show that ever aired is legally available online. Surprisingly, there are plenty of high-profile shows that are not available for online consumption – not even for purchase. For a variety of reasons, there are some seriously popular (or once-popular) shows that you just can't find online.

Here's my list of the concluded shows that were popular in their day and are not currently available online in any streaming form. DVD collections do not count, and the show doesn't have to be free online: shows on HBO Go are regarded as online, even if you have to subscribe to HBO to get them. (I'm looking at you, Sopranos.) And because legal is the watchword here, I am not going to count the ways you can download copies of episodes with BitTorrent or watch them on YouTube.

Note that the availability of online shows is constantly shifting. The Cosby Show was once on Netflix, then off, and now is on Hulu Plus. Nor is this list complete: you may have your own favorites that you can't find online. Stick around until the end, though; I've included linkst to a set of tools that can find shows even on obscure networks.

1. Batman

Image courtesy of Greenway Productions/20th Century Fox Television

Thanks to the DC Comics/Warner Brothers money machine, you can view Batman animated series episodes practically anywhere on the Internet. But the original 1966-1968 classic show starring Adam West and Burt Ward is not showing online at any Bat-time or any Bat-channel. For comic-book aficionados, this is both bad (it's Batman!) and good (the Batusi? Really?). But at the end of the day, who wouldn't want to relive the harrowing cliff-hangers we saw as kids while also catching the barely disguised innuendo we can detect as adults?

2. Full House

Image courtesy of Jeff Franklin Productions/Miller-Boyett Productions/Warner Bros. Television

Yeah, I cringed too. But the 1987-1995 run on ABC was hugely popular and its absence online is sure to be noted. This wholesome-to-the-max family drama with three men caring for three girls (trust me, it worked) actually poked a few holes in the usual sitcom situation, especially with the notion that dads could parent, too.

3. The Golden Girls

Image courtesy of Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions

In the days when comedy shows reigned supreme, this one showed viewers that old could mean funny. For seven seasons, from 1985-1992, this NBC show featuring four sharp women was acerbic enough keep even younger audiences interested. But older audiences flocked to this show, and might again if it was more widely distributed online.

4. The Honeymooners

Image courtesy of Jackie Gleason Enterprises

"To the moon, Alice!" Or at least to the nearest IP address, please. But alas, the comedic genius of Jackie Gleason and an incredible cast of comedy veterans is not to be found online now. Popular from 1953-1956, and then even more when it was revived as a part of a variety show from 1966-1970 (with sporadic episodes throughout the '70s), this comedy about working-class couples remains timeless.

5. Little House on the Prairie

Image courtesy of Ed Friendly Productions/NBC Productions

For about a season, maybe two, this NBC family drama followed the books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder fairly closely. But the popularity of the family drama pushed the writers to expand the Ingalls-verse to keep the show going. Until the end, it mostly worked. The saga of Charles Ingalls and his family in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, was compelling and genuinely warm, even if it bore little resemblance to history.

6. M*A*S*H

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox Television

One of the longest-running shows on television, this medical procedural/comedy/war series ran for 11 seasons on CBS, bringing the Korean War into our homes every Monday night. You wouldn't think a show about a medical unit in a proxy war in Asia would be a hit so soon after the actual Vietnam War, but it was. The chemistry of the cast and the razor-sharp writing kept this show alive far longer than the conflict in which it was set. I'd like my kids to see this one.

7. Mork and Mindy

Image courtesy of Henderson Productions/Miller-Milkis Productions/Paramount Television

This spin-off from Happy Days (yes, go look it up) followed the adventures of one Mork from Ork in Boulder, Colorado, for four seasons. Not a long run, but Robin Williams, Pam Dawber - and even the late Jonathan Winters - created a show full of insane improvisation and sheer goofiness… and maybe a valid mirror on human behavior. That it's not online now? ShazBot, somebody call Orson.

8. The Six Million Dollar Man

Image courtesy of Kenneth Johnson

You can rebuild him. You can make him better than he was before. Faster. Stronger. But if you want to actually watch Lee Majors as the world's first bionic man online? Forget it, the show's locked up tighter than the OSI. Okay, so the show doesn't rank up there with the greats, but it was pretty decent sci-fi that managed to bring super-heroics to the screen and show us a surprisingly realistic future of bionics. Even if they always did run in slow motion.

9. Thirtysomething

Image courtesy of The Bedford Falls Company/United Artists Television

I may be one of the few people on the planet that has never watched a single episode of this show, but there's no denying its impact as an ensemble drama that drew in the lucrative demographic of, well, thirtysomethings to ABC for four seasons. The show's depiction of baby boomers in their thirties was smart, well-written and very much loved by its viewers.

10. The Waltons

Image courtesy of Lorimar Productions

This nine-season family drama based on the novel Spencer's Mountain ran from 1972-1981 depicting the lives of a rural Virginia family in the midst of the Great Depression and World War II. This was a big family, too, with seven kids, the parents, and the grandparents all trying to make do in one of the roughest American economies ever. A lot of people make fun of this show, pegging it as pure schmaltz. Yet the Waltons enjoy a lifestyle that many people not-so-secretly strive for - and might watch all over again.

Good night, John-Boy.

Find Your Own Favorites

If you are not sure if the show you want to watch is online anywhere, try Sidereel, which does a pretty good job listing the online availability of shows. It's not 100% accurate, though, so if your results come up empty, try Hulu next.

Even if you are not a Hulu subscriber, you can still search for TV episodes on the site. If Hulu does not have them, it may point you to other sources (like cable channel websites) where the show can be watched.

You might also try Netflix, which often changes show availability at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully, all your favorite shows will be online someday. Until then, what shows are you missing?

Lead image courtesy of Henderson Productions/Miller-Milkis Productions/Paramount Television

This post was originally published on our SAY Media sister site, Remodelista. We're republishing it with permission.

We've all been there. You want to push a piece of furniture or a countertop appliance close to the wall and a protruding plug stands in the way. And let's not even talk about the wall-mounted flat-screen TV that require unsightly cords and plugs but needs to sit flush against the wall. Here's a simple solution: recessed outlets. 

Above: Notice the absence of cords connecting to the flat screen TV In a Brooklyn loft. Recessed outlets sit invisibly behind flush mount screens, keeping plugs and cords out of sight (for more guidance, see 7 Secrets for Living with a Flat Screen TV, Cord Control Edition). Photograph by Ragnar Ómarsso via Skona Hem. 

Above: You can push a dresser up to the wall and still use the plug that is tucked behind by sinking a standard two socket outlet into the wall. The Leviton Recessed Duplex Outlet is available in white, black, ivory and almond; $7.53 at Amazon. 

Above: To be filed under "great practical ideas," the simple Leviton Recessed Single Outlet with Clock Hanger includes a hook for mounting clocks and other objects (like a piece of art with a picture light that needs power); $6.80 at Amazon.

Above: Hiding outlets behind small appliances not only eliminates an eyesore but also helps gain counter space as the appliances can be pushed directly against the wall. The Arlington Recessed Electrical Outlet Mounting Box accommodates two-, four- and six-plug receptacles (sold separately) and has a paintable coverplate for even more camouflage; prices start at $15.24 at Amazon.

Above: The Leviton Recessed Dual-Gang Duplex Receptacle with Six QuickPort Openings works well for wall-mounted flat screen TVs, wall units and computer monitors. It manages multiple cords in a single location with connection points for AC power, audio, video, data and phone; $20.95 at Kyle Designs.

Above: The Datacomm Recessed Media Plate with Duplex Receptacle features a super-low-profile design that fits behind the thinnest mounts and  TVs; $20.45 at Amazon. 

Another solution for eliminating electric socket eyesores in the kitchen? Flush pop-up outlets. 

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - affectionately known as MST3K to its legion of fans - is a "cult television comedy series" that mocked forgotten science fiction films from 1988-1999. Its heart still beats, as three long-time writers and stars for the show - Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy - continue to serve up hilarious "riffs" on B-movies online at their site RiffTrax. 

Now the trio want to take on Hollywood - with your help - and mock big-budget blockbusters, such as Twilight and The Hunger Games, in front of a live audience. They also want to help everyone create their own riffs on movies and TV shows.

Movie Rights Are Not Cheap

The tagline for RiffTrax is: "We don't make movies, we make fun of them." But Hollywood doesn't want its movies made fun of, so the RiffTrax crew can currently do their thing only for films that are either in the public domain or whose rights come very cheap. (Owners of really bad movies, not surprisingly, let their works go for very little.)

For flicks like Birdemic or Kingdom of the Spiders (William Shatner's finest performance of 1977), RiffTrax customers download a single file (available in numerous formats), typically for $10, and watch on an iPad or laptop, or burn it onto a DVD. But that won't work for popular films, like Thor or The Avengers, or the Patrick Swayze classic, Roadhouse, whose licensing costs are too high.

For blockbusters, the RiffTrax group records its audio commentary in MP3 format. Users download the file, typically for a $4 fee, then play the MP3 on a laptop or iPod, for example, while watching the movie on a television screen. It's certainly not an elegant solution, so the crew is trying raise enough cash to license more high-profile films.

A highly successful Kickstarter campaign seeking to secure the rights to broadcast Twilight - just so it can be made fun of - netted $265,000 against an original goal of $55,000. The hope, according to Bill Corbett, is that by "backing up the money truck" to Hollywood, RiffTrax can secure the rights to the movies that need mocking most.

Once a deal is signed - it's currently in negotiations - the trio plan to riff the film live and stream the performance (also live) to "hundreds" of other theaters. They also hope to offer a copy of the performance as a DVD or download - film and riff embedded together.

The Riffmasters

To get the inside scoop, I spoke with "riffmaster" Michael J. Nelson:

ReadWrite: Describe RiffTrax to the uninitiated.

Mike Nelson: It's like sitting down to watch a movie with your funniest friends. 

ReadWrite: Why are there no puppets like on MST3K? 

Mike Nelson: RiffTrax is a different animal. We don't own the copyright to the MST3K puppets. Plus, it just wouldn't work for synching commentary tracks to the popular movies." 

ReadWrite: Why start the Kickstarter campaign with Twilight?

Mike Nelson: Twilight's been our single most popular [downloadable] riff to date. We want to do a live riff of the film and stream that to hundreds of other theaters.

ReadWrite: What's the process for choosing a movie to riff?

Mike Nelson: It's hard to make fun of a film that's trying to be funny but fails. It has to be either unintentionally bad or taking itself too seriously. When I first watched Birdemic, for example, I assumed the director had to be joking. He wasn't - that makes all the difference. 

ReadWrite: Do fans help you decide which movies to riff on?

Mike Nelson: Definitely. On Twitter and Facebook, or the user forum on our site. We have a backlog so can't always get to their choice right away, but we listen.   

ReadWrite: Tell me about iRiffs.

Mike Nelson: iRiffs is the section on our site where anyone can upload their movie commentaries. We have minimal requirements - as long as the content isn't deeply offensive, you can offer your riff through the site.

ReadWrite: And you split the revenues with the individual?

MN: Correct. I would like to say that anyone who uploads their riff to our site, please use a halfway decent USB microphone. Too many poor mics have killed some otherwise great performances.

ReadWrite: There were several other people involved in writing and performing for Mystery Science Theater. Why only you, Kevin and Bill for RiffTrax?

Mike Nelson: Kevin, Bill and I were the last in-theater performers when MST3K ended. We all lived near one another in Minnesota, and were doing a lot of projects together. We fell into an easy rapport, so when I started RiffTrax in 2006 it was easy to bring those two onboard. Joel [Hodgson - the original host] wanted to get Cinematic Titanic up and running so it never worked out for everyone to be together." [Cinematic Titanic includes several MST3K performers who similarly offer film riff performances of B movies. The group has said that this will be its final year working together.] 

Finally, I asked riffmaster Bill Corbett if the crew had any plans to make it's own deliberately bad movie:

None. I think it would be surprisingly hard to recreate the magic of an unintentionally bad movie. It would wind up too self-conscious. We've seen a lot of attempts to do that, and they never capture the exquisite fun and weirdness of someone trying in earnest to make a serious movie, and just making a mess of it.

Lead image from Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents Laserblast.

Picture of the RiffTrax team, from left to right: Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, Michael J. Nelson.

News broke earlier this week of a new hack to Nintendo's Wii U that would allow gamers to play unauthorized (read: pirated) games. Nintendo immediately disputed it. But whether it's true or not, the Wii U will most certainly be hacked before long — and that fact tells us a lot about the increasingly tense arms race being waged between console manufacturers and hackers.

Users have been hacking their consoles — in the sense of writing new games and implementing new functions of their operating systems — since the dawn of gaming. But back when the hardware of your 1970s era console only slightly resembled the inside of your computer, it was more of a hobby and less of a widespread movement. 

In fact, you can blame game developers, not ordinary users, for modern anti-hacking measures. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, had no software restrictions at all, and neither did competing consoles. This left developers free to create a flood of terrible and low quality games that overwhelmed consumers and led to the great video game crash of 1983 — the industry’s first major recession. 

Nintendo Clamps Down

That changed with the rise of Nintendo, which sought to reverse Atari’s openness in favor of tight control over console technology and a business model that relied on revenue from licenses sold to game developers. Nintendo sought to ensure high-quality games by retaining the sole right to approve them — and by locking out rivals and hackers who might create their own.

Overnight, the challenge for hackers flipped from exploiting the potential of Atari’s open platform to finding ways to circumvent Nintendo’s lockout chip. It’s a cycle that’s continued to this day. Today, the Internet makes it easier than ever for hackers to collaborate and distribute exploits that allow even average players to bypass the lockdowns on their consoles.

If the Wii U has indeed been hacked, then it will join the ranks of the Playstation 3, Playstation 2, XBox 360, Xbox, Wii, Nintendo DS, and PSP. All of these consoles can be jailbroken like iPhones, ready to run whichever programs their owners choose. That could mean running an operating system like Linux on your XBox, loading homebrew, or original, games on your Wii, or playing pirating copies of commercial games on your PS3. 

Hackers Rev Up The Arms Race...

Obviously I don’t endorse piracy, and even at its most innocuous, console hacking lies in a legal gray area. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to change that.)

But it’s hard to imagine that hackers will — or can — be stopped. Locking down consoles seems to do little, if anything, to slow down people intent on hacking anyway. The more restrictions console manufacturers apply, the more it appears to spur hackers into trying to remove them. 

Or just enrage them. For instance, Sony's PlayStation Network —its online game service — was hacked shortly after Sony removed support for Linux on the PS3. Sony’s retroactive cutoff of the one place hackers could play around in the console could easily have incited the attacks in response. Of course, the PSN hack was very different from console “jailbreaks,” not least because it may also have resulted in credit-card fraud following the theft of user data.

...And So Do Game Companies

Yet console manufacturers won't give up, either. Their lockdowns are mostly ineffective against hackers, but they do plenty to make it not worth the average player’s time. If there was no lockdown at all, anyone could burn illegal copies of games on CDs to share.

The big console makers also have an incentive to hold onto all the money they can get. Aside from pirates, consoles face a slew of big challenges, not least among them a robust second-hand game market they would dearly love to kill off and a profusion of 99-cent game apps that are frequently just as fun to play as the $60 monsters produced by big game developers.

Of course, this entire mode of thinking could go out the window when the Ouya is out this summer. The world’s first “pre-hacked” console is a throwback to the fully open Atari. The very fact that it earned $8 million while still a concept shows a high demand for a open-source system, but time will tell if it inherits the Atari’s woes or finds a way to make it work.

Photo courtesy of Nintendo

Curiosity: What's Inside The Cube, the one-part-smartphone-game, one-part-social-experiment that launched last November, is getting its most substantial update yet. In a move aimed at bringing the contest to a faster close, UK studio 22Cans has accelerated the game to its last 50 layers, in effect erasing the months and months of players tapping away on the giant cube it would have taken to get to the center.

This World Is Predicted To End On May 21

The studio's current estimated end date - unless player participation unexpectedly spikes - is May 21, which coincidentally happens to be the same day Microsoft will announce its next-generation Xbox console. 

"It has been an elongated, protracted experiment in curiosity, but if I'm someone whose fingers are bleeding now, enough is enough," said 22Cans founder Peter Molyneux, known primarily for creating the Fable game series before leaving Microsoft last year to found the independent studio. "We decided that we could have just left it going and probably less and less people would be fascinated... or we could set a layer and it would be a race to the center," he added. 

The new update comes on the heels of last week's quiet addition to the game that let players pay to both remove and add cubelets to the current layer. This feature will remain for some, but not all, of the final 50 layers. 

The idea behind Curiosity is simple: one giant cube, with a secret prize at its center, was handed over to millions of players who all collaboratively chip away at its many layers by tapping one piece (or cubelet) at a time, of which there were 68 billion spread out over hundreds of layers. Only the lucky person to tap the last cubelet gets to see what's inside, and Molyneux has often described that mystery in grandiose fashion, referring to it as "life changing."

(See also: Gaming Legend Peter Molyneux: What Makes A Great Game?)

Curiousity was meant to be both a social experiment in massively multiplayer smartphones games as well as a learning experience for 22Cans, which announced its first multiplatform title Godus on Kickstarter shortly after launching Curiosity.

Curiosity Now About Learning Different Things

"Part of our motivation in doing Curiosity was to learn how to do these things for Godus, like learning how to connect people, how to scale up our servers," Molyneux said. Despite massive server issues hampering Curiosity's launch, the game picked up steam and garnered more than 3 million downloads within one month. Godus also surpassed its Kickstarter goal of £450,000 on the final day, securing 22Cans' future in cross-platform game development. 

With only 50 layers to go, the race to the finish will tight, raising valid concerns that the final tap that wins it all might not be recorded accurately. "When we get to the final five layers, we'll have something called Cube Watch," Molyneux explained. "We'll be watching it 24 hours a day and we'll be sitting in the office waiting for that end to come."

He stressed that the studio has taken substantial measures to protect against cheating and will be able to validate the tapper of the final cubelet as soon as it happens. Players will also get a real-time reminder in the white space around the cube of how many layers are left and what the estimated lifespan of the experiment is. 

"In our hyper-connected world, what happens when we put an objective that is so insanely far off that it becomes almost meaningless?" Now that the objective is almost within grasp, Curiosity is raising new questions about the player motivation and connectedness players await their chance to finally see what's inside the cube. 

After months of promises, Microsoft finally integrated Skype with Outlook.com, its cloud email and calendaring service. But for its next act, Microsoft may well put Skype on its Xbox console — a move with far more intriguing, and even disturbing, ramifications.

As of today, a select group of Outlook.com users in the UK can begin placing video or voice calls, or sending instant messages, to their existing Skype contacts. Within Outlook, users will have a choice: traditional email will work as before, although the new "Messaging" options will trigger the Skype capabilities. Users can either type in a friend's name within People, or — in a nice touch — simply click on their picture to launch a message.

Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype two years ago in order to "adapt to a changing market, primarily characterised by permanent and ubiquitous connectivity," as the IT analyst outfit Duquesne Group put it at the time. So far, Microsoft has steadily moved Skype forward as its ubiquitous communications interface across PCs, Windows tablets, and smartphones. That leaves the Xbox.

Video Kinect To Xbox Skype?

It's virtually a given that Skype will come to the living room. In February, Giovanni Mezgec, a Skype enterprise product marketing manager, told me that Skype users at home might use a "set-top box" — like, say, the Xbox! — to access the service.

"You are the same time a consumer, the same time a mother, the same time an employee, the same time a person that travels on the bus, you get the idea," he said in an interview at the time. "What we wanted to do was to offer a set of tools from the living room to the boardroom, a communication platform that is rationalized, but different."

Officially, though, Microsoft is keeping mum. "We are always thinking about what is next for our platform, but we have nothing further to share at this time," a spokeswoman said in an email. Rumors of the Skype-Xbox integration popped up earlier this year, following a Microsoft job posting.

And Microsoft's Xbox already has a videoconferencing solution: Video Kinect, which allows Xbox players to set up video chats with their Xbox Live friends of they own the Kinect depth camera peripheral. 

Separate But Equal

In many ways, Skype is playing catchup to features already offered by Video Kinect and the Xbox Live service itself. There's the video chats, of course, but Xbox Live also supports presence (who's playing or watching what, provided that users allows their friends to see this); group chats or play experiences, known as "parties"; text and video messages; and private chat. 

So far, Microsoft has kept its Xbox Live community separate and distinct from its other online services. That means that each Xbox user can have several collections of friends: Outlook contacts, Messenger contacts, Skype contacts, and an Xbox Live group. If you include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which Microsoft also integrates with, that's seven separate groups. Granted, many of these contacts overlap — but many don't. (Note that Microsoft asks you for a Microsoft Outlook.com or Hotmail account when you sign up as a new user on the Xbox, for support purposes.)

Microsoft may not be able to do much with how Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn manage their own contact databases, but if and when it integrates Skype with the Xbox, will it merge a user's Xbox contacts with his or her Skype contact list — or even Outlook contacts?

Turns Out Ubiquity Has A Downside

The question is really a cultural one. Does it make sense for a company like Microsoft to obliterate the distinction between work and play this way?

If you own a Surface tablet, and set up Skype for the first time, Microsoft will ask you to merge your Hotmail contacts with your Skype contacts. That's not really that big of a deal. But do you really want your boss calling you when you're playing Lego Batman with your son? I don't.

What might be interesting, however — from either Skype or Video Kinect — would be the option to replace video avatars with actually small video screens of my friends. I might not like losing screen real estate in Gears of War, but it might add more of a communal sense while playing Hearts or Xbox poker.

Anything else, though, runs the risk of alienating users who just want to be left alone in the evenings. Slowly, we're all being forced to integrate our jobs into other aspects of our lives. Microsoft may want to eventually push Skype into the Xbox, but it needs to do so delicately.

Something huge is happening in online TV this year. No, it's not a new streaming set top box or Web-exclusive video series. It's not even an app. It's a milestone: 2013 is the year that Internet-first TV became truly normal. 

People have been watching TV programs online at places like Hulu and Netflix for years. But until recently, most that viewing has involved programs that had previously aired on broadcast or cable TV. There have long been geek-centric webisodes of TV-esque programming online, but nothing that everyday people would watch. This year, things are changing. 

"An Inflection Point For Online Television"

For evidence of the mainstreaming of Web-first TV, look no further than the online revival of All My Children and One Life to Live. The classic TV soap operas are returning not to a broadcast network, but to Hulu and iTunes. It may sound like a distribution strategy fit for a tech video podcast or no-name Web TV series, but these are soap operas. TV doesn't get more mainstream than this.

(See also: The Internet's Assault On Traditional TV Is Working)

Citing an "inflection point for online television", the shows' backers are betting big on the notion that enough people watch TV online these days to make this a profitable endeavor. If recent history is any indication, it's a safe bet.

The first sign of Internet TV's legitimacy among mainstream audiences came earlier this year with House of Cards. We still don't know precisely how many people tuned into Netflix's TV-quality political drama, but it's clearly been popular among the service's 29 million subscribers, as well as many critics.

Most importantly, the show got people talking. Not just tech-savvy people living their lives online, but normal, everyday people. Suddenly, you could hear House of Cards being chattered about at parties as though it was the latest drama on HBO, whose U.S. subscriber count Netflix just surpassed. (Sort of, at least.)

At 4 million subscribers, Hulu is markedly smaller than Netflix, but it's growing fast. And unlike Netflix, Hulu lets non-subscribers stream shows for free from the desktop, so the potential reach of shows like the new All My Children isn't capped at 4 million, or even 29 million, for that matter. Then there's iTunes, through which viewers will be able to purchase individual episodes.

The Imperfect Science of Measuring Web TV

Even on these popular online services, these soap operas will almost certainly fall short of the kind of ratings numbers they used to see on daytime TV. It's impossible to know for sure, since each of these services has different viewership metrics and they're not particularly eager to share. Even Netflix, which proudly boasts the success of House of Cards, won't say just how many people actually watched the show. 

The measurement challenge might begin to change soon, as Nielsen moves toward measurement tools that Internet sources into account. Next month, a temporary pilot run of its Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will track online views from the networks' own websites. In time, the tracking method could become a standard utilized by an array of online video services, finally painting an accurate picture of what's getting watched. 

Nielsen has a long way to go with Internet TV measurement, but the fact that it's tinkering with a decades-old formula is a sign that online TV viewership is now too enormous for it to ignore if it wants to stay relevant.

Before the year is halfway over, we'll have another test of Internet TV's mainstream appeal when Arrested Development's fourth season lands on Netflix. Like the soap operas, Arrested Development is making the leap from TV to online, but in this case the show is backed by eight years of anticipation and the same data-driven smarts that all but ensured House of Cards would be a hit. 

Again, we won't know how many people will actually tune in to the new season of Arrested Development unless Netflix decides to share that data. In the meantime, we'll have only limited, largely anecdotal clues to go from. Perhaps the most important: Are people talking about this? I don't mean on Twitter, but at the bar. That's how we'll really know that a new era in television's history is underway. 

Futurama, the animated comedy from Simpsons creator Matt Groening and writer David X. Cohen, is unparalleled in its ability to mix lowbrow humor with high concept science and technology. But after an initial run on Fox from 1999 to 2003 and a glorious revival six years later, Comedy Central has pulled the plug and will end the show with its seventh season this summer.

In keeping with ReadWrite's mission to map the programmable universe, we figured that a roundup of some of the greatest inventions from the year 3000 was most definitely called for. Futurama, after all, was always at its best turning some recent technological development or scientific notion into farce.

Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments.

Disclaimer: We decided to keep it light-hearted, so we apologize in advance to any fans of the infamous suicide booth.

1. Smell-O-Scope

In the show's first season episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage," the Smell-O-Scope was Professor Farnsworth's seemingly useless space smelling invention. As he explained, "If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won't be out of the loop." It certainly came in handy when it detected a giant ball of garbage — a last-ditch effort by New York in the year 2020 to stave off overflowing landfills — that was hurling towards the Earth. The ensuing antics involved continuous spoofs on the 1998 film Armageddon. 

Turns out that in 2011, a small company actually invented a handheld Smell-O-Scope, although it dubbed it  the Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometer. Killjoys.

2. Scooty-Puff, Jr.

When Fry was tasked with saving the universe from the Brainspawn in season four, he had to infiltrate their secret base, the Infosphere. Fry's allies against the brains, the highly intelligent yet adorable Niblonians, gave him the Scooty-Puff, Jr. for the task. A wind-up contraption resembling a children's toy, the Scooty-Puff, Jr. ended up falling apart when Fry tried to escape, leading him to request a more advanced vehicle — the larger, more impressive Scooty-Puff, Sr.

3. Fing-Longer

Invented by Professor Farnsworth in an alternative timeline — one he detected via the What-If Machine in the season two episode "Anthology of Interest I," the Fing-Longer allowed the wearer to reach farther than normal — say, to press buttons. Not exactly groundbreaking, but who couldn't love a name like the Fing-Longer? 

Not only does this device now actually exist as a Wii mote accessory, the idea of the Professor getting inspiration from himself provided an interesting philosophical conundrum. Can you be said to have invented something if the initial inspiration came from some external source, even if that external source is an alternate version of yourself? Yeah, we'll get back to you on that.

4. Mind-Switcher

The season six episode "The Prisoner of Benda" introduced this invention of Professor Farnsworth and Amy, the Mind-Switcher. After a dizzying number of mind switches, the whole crew is in disarray with everyone in someone else's body. 

This episode generated what was apparently the first mathematical theorem created for a television show. Futurama writer Ken Keeler, who holds a doctorate in mathematics, wrote the Futurama Theorem as both a real-world theorem and the solution used in the show that proves "that regardless of how many mind switches between two bodies have been made, they can still all be restored to their original bodies using only two extra people, provided these two people have not had any mind switches prior."

5. What-If Machine

The What-If Machine was a Professor Farnsworth device that could predict a scenario based on any "what if" question it was asked. After a series of events that pertain to each character on the crew and their respective "what if" questions, the Professor tosses the machine in the garbage, declaring it a failure due to the preposterous scenarios it generated. The whole episode turns on its head when everything is revealed to be one huge, layered simulation from the What-If Machine, generated when the Professor asks what if he had invented the Fing-Longer.

6. eyePhone

One of the few times Futurama took a swipe at real-world companies and products, the season six episode "Attack of the Killer App" introduced an obvious parody of a well-known Apple device. The writers envisioned a 31st Century eyePhone as an actual eye implant that projects a holographic screen in front of the user's face. 

7. Forwards Time Machine

Featured in one of the show's best episodes, "The Late Philip J. Fry," the Forwards Time Machine is a Professor Farnsworth invention that only lets you move through time in one direction, specifically to avoid temporal paradoxes (a topic the show has explored in past episodes). Fry joins Bender and the Professor to take the machine one minute into the future, though of course they screw up and get thrown thousands of years forward. Ultimately, they have nowhere to go except the end of time. 

In true high-low concept fashion, Bender, Fry and the Professor couch it on lawn chairs, crack some beers and proceed to watch the universe end, only to realize that a new Big Bang begins to happen all over again. Turns out that idea is an actual scientific model, called the Big Bounce, that posits that the universe is forever oscillating through a cosmic boom-bust cycle.

8. The Electronium Hat

Invented by the Professor to give animals super intelligence, the Electronium Hat was a wearable device introduced in the season one episode "Mars University." It used sunspots to produce "cognitive radiation," whatever that means. The monkey Guenter gets uplifted by the hat and spends much of the episode quarrelling with Fry and lamenting the fact that he can't live his natural life due to his unnatural super-smarts.

9. The Clone-O-Mat

In the season two episode "A Clone Of Mine Own," the Professor introduces his own 12-year-old clone, named Cubert. Created via the Professor's Clone-O-Mat, Cubert gets named as the Professor's heir.

The Clone-O-Mat makes a return in the season four episode "Jurassic Bark," one of the rare but emotionally powerful moments when Futurama shifted from comedy to animated drama. Nominated for an Emmy, the episode explores Fry's anguish after discovering his former dog Seymour's fossilized 21st century remains, a find that prompts Fry to agonize over whether or not to clone his long-lost animal companion.

10. The Spheroboom

Of all the Professor's many doomsday devices, the Spheroboom was his favorite and the one device that he couldn't part with when selling his stash to Hedonismbot in "Bender's Big Score," the straight-to-DVD film that became part one of season five. The Spheroboom appears to bend an object around its center until it implodes in an explosion of "doom radiation."

In a not-so-subtle jab at the National Rifle Association, the episode introduced the National Ray-Gun Association, which protested a three-day waiting period for mad scientists to purchase doomsday devices.

Over time, great cities tend to inspire their own iconic comedies: New York's Seinfeld. Boston's Cheers. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now Betas is the show that could put Silicon Valley on the comedy map - but only if you help.

Betas is one of the eight comedy pilots that Amazon has been featuring on its Instant Video page. If enough voters back Betas - or any of the other comedies - then Amazon will greenlight its development into a full-fledged original series, taking on shows like House of Cards and Lilyhammer on Netflix.

Betas = Heart, Surrealism And Desperation

To its credit, Betas integrates much of what made 1980s comedies great - heart, a touch of implausibility that borders on surrealism - and swirls it all together with the desperation and ambition of the Silicon Valley feeding frenzy. For many entrepreneurs, the right handshake seems to be all that separates them from poverty or untold riches, a cruelty that can instantly reduce months of work to ashes. Chasing that dream is frustrating. And funny.

Betas reminds us that Silicon Valley has become high school writ large: geeks may be the new jocks, but the popular kids still have all the money and dweebs are still dweebs. And owning all the toys is still the high score.

Betas begins in the sort of community workspace many techies could imagine working in, if they weren't, you know, working: Employees chase each other around with Nerf guns, others grind Cheetos into their keyboards. "Nash," the neurotic, socially inhibited engineer played by Karan Soni, can't take it. He freaks out and hides in one of the telephone booths the workspace has put against the wall, a quasi-ironic homage to older technology. Nash, despondent, tells his company's founder, Trey (Joe Dinicol), that the latest build of their Highlight-like social discovery app, BRB, bricked the phone.

"Who cares? Investors are making investments from napkin sketches made by high school dropouts!" Trey responds.

"I don't make napkin sketches!" Nash wails. 

The plot of the pilot revolves around a meeting that Trey is convinced BRB needs with George Murchison (Ed Begley, Jr.), who plays electric flute with Moby and slices his own "Ferrari of trout" with an Asian shortsword. Part of the reason is one-upping the team behind "Valet Me," a parking app whose sudden success makes the douche bag developers instant stars. Trey is convinced that the when Murchison hears BRB's pitch, he'll invest - and talks his way into Murchison's home using "Larry Page" as an alias.

The other members of the BRB team include Hobbes (Jonathan C. Daly), a bearded, jaded developer whose idea of relaxing is watching Webcam porn at a local laundromat, and Mitchell (Charlie Saxton) a pudgy dweeb whose biggest goal is to talk to Mikki (Maya Erskine), the cool Asian chick who's looking for just about anything to spark her empty life. "I would never say damp," Mikki muses. "It makes my vaj seem like the Dagobah system." 

Betas Brings Silicon Valley To Life

Betas may be a scripted comedy, but it feels a hell of a lot more real than Randi Zuckerberg's reality TV fiasco, Startups: Silicon Valley that debuted last year. Then, a cast of pretty wannabes partied their way from meetup to meeting to hangout to loft party, leaving everyone in Silicon Valley muttering, "What the hell is this?" Startups' worst crime, however, wasn't that it was vapid; it was just boring, and we'd seen all the tricks that reality series could throw at us before. It's hard to fathom how anyone got beyond an episode or two.

(See also Startups Silicon Valley: The Painful Truth Behind A Caricature Of Excess.)

The Big Bang Theory may hold the crown of TV's geekiest show. But BBT mocks geeky science culture - Star Trek, Iron Man and the ins and outs of academic life - without really touching on what makes a life in technology so great. Betas tosses you in the deep end; it assumes you know what "Series A" funding is, and who Mark Zuckerberg and Page are. Little touches - bumping phones to swap digits, for example - lend the series the "oh yeah, people really do do that" feeling. Silicon Valley will hit the big screen this summer, when The Internship looks inside life at Google - but do you really think a sanctioned look inside the Googleplex is going to end up all that funny?

(See also Geek Movies: The Top 10 Most Inspirational Films For Techies.)

Think Scrubs: Silicon Valley

Think of Betas as Scrubs Silicon Valley: the four members of BRB are starting at the bottom, hoping to climb to the top. In Scrubs, there's a natural progression: the young residents must earn their way up the medical ladder to become full-fledged doctors. What makes Betas so compelling is that Silicon Valley isn't like that. Instead, it's a roller-coaster ride: This week it's a funding deal, next week it's a show-stopping bug. What happens if Trey and the team accidentally leak their user information? What if they're hacked? Do they attract the attention of Anonymous? Does Microsoft make a pitch to buy them? Does IBM?

Look, crazy stuff happens in Silicon Valley every day. But there's no reason why we can't watch it on our TVs at night, too. So watch Betas. Vote for it. Let's make this happen, people.