Netflix recently struck deals with several major Hollywood studios, agreeing to delay new DVD release availability to Netflix subscribers by 30 days in exchange for expanded access to streaming film titles. Now Netflix appears to have struck a deal with independent film producer Relativity Media that will allow them to enter a pay TV window traditionally dominated by HBO, Showtime and Starz. Under the terms of the deal, Netflix gets exclusive rights to distribute Relativity content (of which there isn’t much) instead of premium cable channels. While the companies call it “groundbreaking,” it’s a small win and seems to contribute to growing confusion by consumers as to how, when and where you’ll be able to get films.

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After years of waiting and collapsed business models (like Boeing’s Connexion), we finally started to see in-flight broadband services materialize last year. Unfortunately for carriers, fewer than 10% of air travelers seem willing to pay for the service, at least at the current price point. Companies keep tinkering with pricing in the hopes of finding their sweet spot but free Wi-Fi promotions from the likes of Google and others appear to have ruined flyers’ appetites for Wi-Fi bills. A new report by In Stat says in-flight broadband should see $95 million in 2010 revenues (up from $7 million in 2009), while “fee per connect is expected to deteriorate” due to lower negotiated roaming and other costs.

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Rumors have been circulating for some time that Hulu is planning a $9.95 subscription service with a select few episodes still available for free but a catalog of additional seasons available for a monthly fee. Those rumors continue to bubble over, with some anonymous sources insisting that the subscription “Hulu Plus” could launch as soon as next week though possibly only for a limited base of 10,000 testers. As you can imagine, stumbling blocks remain in Hulu’s negotiations with broadcasters, who cling tightly to program licensing out of fear of the broadband video (r)evolution. The service is also expected to see integration with the XBOX 360 but rumors also now point to PS3 integration as well.

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Back in May it was noted how Verizon was doing something interesting in Tampa to try and grab market share from cable: they were offering no-contract FiOS to customers. In other words, users in Florida are now getting the same triple-play pricing as users that used to have to sign contracts instead of being penalized roughly $25-$30 extra for no-contract.

As Verizon shifts from expanding FiOS into new markets to upping subscription rates in already deployed markets, apparently Verizon found that their long-term contracts and ETFs, which telcos imported over from the wireless sector, was a deterrent to many customers moving over from cable.

Verizon has reached out to us to note that they’re now taking this idea nationally in the hopes of ramping up subscriber numbers. “Basically we are taking the program in Florida you wrote about recently and going national with it,” Verizon’s Robert Elek tells Broadband Reports. “The name change from Verizon’s FiOS Service Commitment to FiOS Worry Free Guarantee is really the only change from what we’ve been doing in Florida,” he says.

According to Elek, the results in Florida and Pennsylvania “exceeded what the company was expecting,” so going national “seems like the natural next step.”

As part of the deal, users who don’t sign a long-term contract won’t have to pay more and they’ll receive a guarantee of their initial price for one year. They also won’t have to pay an early termination fee (which was raised to $360 earlier this year). After Verizon’s announcement of the new strategy in Tampa, cable competitors like Bright House Communications accused the telco of simply copying a practice cable operators have been using for years.

Users interested in the whole Verizon release can find it here.

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It was noted how AT&T’s Microcell femtocell service was already a dubious value proposition given the device, intended to improve in-home cell coverage by routing voice and data calls over broadband, involves users paying AT&T to help ease congestion on local towers. Not only does routing calls over your broadband service result in you eating your minutes, but it also now appears that using 3G at home eats away at your caps.

That’s absurd, given that both voice and 3G over the device uses the user’s bandwidth – and not precious backhaul resources.

AT&T’s been making the rounds trying to give an explanation for why they made the decision to make their Microcell service an even worse value, but the explanations so far aren’t making sense.

“3G MicroCell is primarily intended to enhance the voice call quality experience in your home,” AT&T’s Seth Bloom tells us. “While it can carry mobile data traffic, that’s not the primary solution it provides,” he says. “Wi-Fi is the optimal solution for home mobile data use. We encourage people to take advantage of Wi-Fi capabilities – that’s why all of our smartphones include Wi-Fi radios, and usage on Wi-Fi doesn’t count against your mobile data usage bucket.”

Customers will probably decide to use their Wi-Fi connection when in the home. That still doesn’t explain why AT&T lets the service eat 3G bandwidth caps should they use 3G. In that case, the traffic’s being routed over the exact same broadband connection as Wi-Fi. Whether users should use 3G over the Microcell in the home when Wi-Fi’s available isn’t the point. The service still shouldn’t be eating your wireless caps just like femtocells shouldn’t eat your voice minutes.

Bloom goes on to insist that the Microcell “uses our core wireless network just like a call placed while driving down the highway uses the core wireless network.” “The only difference is how that data or call gets there via a MicroCell connected to a wired broadband connection instead of a cell tower.”

Again though, you’re not using AT&T’s tower or their backhaul, you’re using your own already-paid-for bandwidth. AT&T’s entire justification for their new low caps and overages is backhaul and tower congestion (though even that’s dubious – simple profit is the more likely motivation) – and congestion’s not an issue here. Sure, there’s costs involved, but they’re minor compared to the costs of traditional wireless connectivity.

Consider these are users shelling out for a home broadband connection, a wireless 3G and data connection, possibly an added landline connection, the upfront cost of hardware and an additional $20 if they want unlimited voice that doesn’t eat away at their minutes. Just how much are we expecting the average consumer to pay per month for simple, regular-use voice and data connectivity?

Either AT&T’s gunning to make an additional few million annually in revenue off of those incapable of differentiating between 3G and Wi-Fi, or they’re incapable of getting the Wi-Fi/3G femtocell billing straightened out and don’t want to admit it.

Some might think this is all rather nerdy semantics, but these are important questions when exploring how carriers seem to be sucking all the value out of the femtocell with absurd pricing decisions and other penalties – especially when the femtocell helps the carrier more than it does you.

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Last week a security flaw on AT&T’s network allowed hackers to obtain the e-mail addresses and ICC-IDs for more than 100,000 Apple iPad owners, many of them high level politicians or military personnel. On the heels of an announcement that the FBI would be looking into the breach, AT&T has sent out a letter to the impacted customers (sort of) explaining the breach. The letter, which avoids admitting any blame for the website’s security issues, informs users that “unauthorized computer ‘hackers’ maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster.” AT&T Then complains that the group “put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity.” The hackers have responded to AT&T’s letter here.

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Microsoft held their E3 keynote in Los Angeles yesterday morning, and as expected the primary focus was the company’s “Kinect” motion-sensing camera. Though the company also announced they were expanding the Xbox360 video lineup by adding a significant amount of sports content through a deal with ESPN, including not only ESPN shows – but also some live sporting events in HD (NBA, MLB, college football and college basketball). Said events include some interactivity during events with other Xbox 360 owners (polls, trivia, etc.), and both voice and gesture remote control via Kinect, which goes on sale in November at $150.

Microsoft also introduced a slimmer version of the Xbox 360 with integrated 802.11N. There’s no confirmation yet of a lingering rumor concerning Hulu integration.

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Given that AT&T’s other hotspot partners McDonalds and Barnes and Noble now offer free Wi-Fi and AT&T offers free Wi-Fi to most of their DSL, U-Verse and wireless customers – it seemed like only a matter of time before Starbucks left paid Wi-Fi behind. According to a company statement, Wi-Fi in Starbucks stores will be completely free starting July 1 and they will simplify the login process so that it’s “one click.”

The company also announced that this fall they’ll launch the Starbucks Digital Network, which will only be accessible in stores, and will offer users access to a number of paywalled outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

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BitTorrent recently announced that the company had open sourced uTP, the BitTorrent protocol powering the latest release of uTorrent. According to the company, they open sourced the code – available here, if you’re interested – in the hopes of extending its adoption within the BitTorrent ecosystem. As mentioned last fall, the new uTP platform is designed to be more network friendly, measuring the time a packet takes to get from peer A to peer B, detecting problems, then throttling speed (usually upload) to help compensate. Still, according to Torrent Freak, there are early hiccups, and users have “seen their speeds decrease dramatically” with the new protocol.

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Slashdot directs your attention to the fact that wireless carriers are just starting to realize they can monetize all matter of data collected from mobile users – specifically data that highlights their movement habits. According to MIT Technology Review, researchers and marketers are finding plenty of new uses for call detail records, or CDRs which allow them to study a mountain of user behavior data. That data can be used by researchers or city planners to study travel behavior – but it’s likely going to be a gold mine on the marketing behavioral front:

…cell phone networks are thinking about monetizing their data, says Jean Bolot, a researcher at network operator Sprint. This means a “two-sided” business model where they not only serve end users but also make money through relationships with other businesses. “This is new in the telco space but not in other areas–look at Google, for example,” he says. Since almost everyone has a cell phone, the scale of the data is immense compared to other sources. Mobility patterns might, for example, be used to adjust property or billboard advertising prices. “Just about every operator on the planet is probably thinking about this right now,” says Bolot.

Of course all of this raises a number of privacy concerns, and while much of this data is aggregate – it’s not particularly difficult for those who buy this data to identify individual user identities (most of us do stay in one place most nights). Keep in mind many ISPs sell user clickstream data (but deny it) with little or no acknowledgment of this fact to the end user, no oversight and no ability to opt out. It seems likely that privacy, consumer education and consumer controls will be an afterthought here as well.

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Engadget has the scoop on Apple’s next incarnation of Apple TV, which actually sounds more interesting than the original Apple TV, a somewhat underwhelming product. According to anonymous tipsters likely countering all that Google TV discussion, Apple’s next Apple TV device will be about the size of an Apple iPhone and will cost just a hundred bucks.

It looks to have roughly the same internals as the Google TV (namely an A4 CPU and 16GB of flash storage) – though it will be capable of 1080p HD. The device also looks to have just two ports (video out and power) and may utilized cloud storage. Of course whether the device is really useful depends on what content’s available and just how obnoxious Apple intends to be when it comes to locking the device down.

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While Verizon’s LTE plans have gotten a lot of press, specific details (especially pricing) on the service have been limited – outside of the fact the service will launch in 25-30 markets sometime this year, at speeds somewhere between 5-12 Mbps downstream. But like AT&T – Verizon does continue to hint at new pricing that moves beyond the concept of unlimited bytes. Speaking at an investor’s conference this week, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam suggested that the company would offer one plan (or one bucket of bytes) that would connect multiple devices. “I think this concern over unlimited megabytes on a smartphone will go away as we bring new devices and new applications onboard,” insists McAdam.

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