Microsoft has just announced an exclusive deal with ESPN which will bring over 3,500 live events a year to Xbox 360 users in HD. Content includes college basketball, college football, soccer, MLB, NBA, all four Grand Slam tennis tournaments and golf majors amongst others. ESPN just did a live demo from the E3 show using voice commands to rewind and replay ESPN video using Microsoft's Kinect technology. Very cool. Xbox LIVE gold members will have access to all of this content for free when it launches. Still waiting on Microsoft to release the date it goes live. Kinect launches in North America on November 4th.

For all of Microsoft's announcements from E3, check our engadget's live blog feed.

Update: Microsoft has confirmed that ESPN will work for Xbox 360 customers even if they don't purchase Kinect, but they obviously won't have any of the voice or motion controls.

Update 2: While not mentioned by Microsoft, (the release only uses the phrase "affiliated service provider") I have confirmed with them that ESPN will only be available to those Xbox LIVE members if their ISP has paid ESPN a license to get ESPN content. Of course ESPN thinks this is only going to force more ISPs to want to license their content, but I don't expect it will. Dumb move by ESPN. At a time when they should be introducing the ESPN to the young up and coming gamers who don't watch a lot of TV, all they are doing is limiting the reach and exposure of their content.

Update 3: Here is a list of all the current ISPs that have a license deal with ESPN for access to their content.

All of the sessions and keynotes from the Streaming Media East and Content Delivery Summit shows are now online and available for viewing for free at streamingmedia.com/videos. All of the content is available for embedding on your own blog or website and you're welcome to syndicate the videos any way you like. Thanks to all of the 150 speakers who made the shows such a success.

Last week Sony and Time Warner reached a deal to make a limited number of HBO programs available to PlayStation 3 users at a cost of $2.99 per download. Full details of the service have not been disclosed but not surprisingly, HBO said that their shows won't be available for download until eleven months after the program first airs on TV and that the digital downloads will coincide with the release their DVDs.

Reading many of the quotes on this deal from executives at both HBO and Sony and it's very clear which side each company is taking. Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony PlayStation is quoted as saying that, "networks like HBO can be beholden to the cable and satellite companies, or they can play wherever the consumers play." That's true, except for the fact that HBO makes the vast majority of their money from the cable and satellite companies and has no problem with this model. Sony is making it sound like HBO is trying to steer clear of the cable providers, by using new distribution channels like the PlayStation 3, when that's not HBO's intention at all.

In fact, HBO said the opposite when HBO Home Entertainment President Henry McGee said that the eleven month window will help preserve the pay TV model and won't give customers an incentive to drop their HBO TV service. No surprise there. HBO is a premium TV service which is the whole reason why they don't even make HBOGO.com (hands-on review of HBOGO.com) available to anyone who is not a pay TV subscriber.

It's also interesting to note that most TV shows that I have purchased via the PlayStation Network are priced at $0.99 yet HBO's shows are going to be priced at 3x that. Seems expensive for a show that is nearly a year old. Almost makes you wonder if HBO really doesn't want that many consumers to actually buy the content so as not to take away from their image of being a premium TV service offering.

Adobe has just made available from their website the long awaited 10.1 version of their Flash player, which is no longer in Release Candidate status. I've only been using it for a few hours now, but so far on my MacBook Pro, it has been very stable and I haven't seen any poor performance issues. Adobe hasn't put out an official release on the news as of yet, but I'm sure that any moment now, we'll see one of the Adobe blogs give us a full rundown of all the improvements in the new player.

Updated: As expected, Adobe's blog now has all the details on the new features of the 10.1 player as well as a post about HTTP dynamic streaming.

This morning Akamai announced it has acquired privately held Velocitude, which operates a platform for customers using mobile video for commerce and marketing purposes. Terms of the deal were not announced but I would not be surprised if Velocitude’s business was valued at under $15M.

While many seem quick to want to compare Akamai’s acquisition of Velocitude to Limelight’s acquisition of Kiptronic last year, they are two completely different solutions. Kiptronic’s platform is focused on helping content owners in the media and entertainment vertical monetize their video content by using amongst other things, campaign managers and ad servers. Velocitude’s platform is focused on helping content owners in the retail, government and enterprise sectors display and deliver mobile video for commerce and marketing purposes and is not used today for delivering ads to mobile devices.

Akamai clearly uses the word enterprise in the release, three times in fact, and never once uses the phrase media and entertainment. So why some posts are mentioning Netflix in their coverage of this news makes no sense. If Akamai wins Netflix’s business for delivering video to the iPhone when it is released later this summer, that won’t be as a result of the Velocitude acquisition. One has nothing to do with the other.

Akamai’s acquisition of Velocitude really comes as no surprise since the company continues to forge ahead in the enterprise space developing and deploying more and more services specifically targeted for enterprise and retail customers. Akamai’s focus has been and will continue to be on the enterprise vertical and while they aren’t giving up on the media and entertainment space, or ceding ground in that market just yet, enterprise services are clearly how Akamai plans to grow the company moving forward. This is quite different from Limelight’s focus which while still targeting customers in the enterprise and retails verticals with a limited product set, their main focus is still solutions for content owners in the media and entertainment verticals.

I don’t know what the size of the enterprise mobile video space is or what the market opportunity is projected to be, but I would expect that we’ll see Akamai give out some details on this segment of the market sometime after their integration of Velocitude’s platform is complete.

Thanks to the very generous folks at Sling Media I have another Slingbox PRO-HD unit to give away to a lucky reader of my blog. To be entered into the drawing, just leave one comment on this post with your full name and a valid email address and I’ll pick one lucky winner at random on June 30th. You must have a U.S. postal address as I will not ship these overseas. Congrats to Jim Doyle who won the last drawing. HUGE thanks to Sling Media for the boxes!

For as far back as I can remember, nearly every video clip on the web has given the viewer the option of deciding if they want to do fullscreen and have the video fill their monitor. This option has been considered the norm in the industry for many, many years, yet for some reason, Apple does not allow videos played back in the browser via the QuickTime plugin to support fullscreen.

When you watch any of the videos on Apple.com that give product demos or visit their popular movie trailer website, there is no option to watch any video in fullscreen unless you first download the video to your hard drive. Why isn't Apple allowing web based videos to go fullscreen? For all the talk Apple keeps doing about "standards", fullscreen playback of videos on the web has been a standard for more than a few years. Maybe not a standard in terms of a programming language like the term is widely used today, but it is a standardized function that's supported by all plugins for video playback, except Apple's.

It's logical to think that Apple was originally doing this simply to force people to pay $29.99 to purchase a QuickTime Pro license, but that only solves the problem for local media. Much of the content on the web can't be downloaded to your hard drive so even if you have a QuickTime Pro license, you still can't make any videos played back in a browser fullscreen. And starting with the QuickTime 7 player, Apple made fullscreen one of the options supported in the free player. So this does not seem to be about pushing people to the pro licenses anymore.

For all the talk Steve Jobs does about the great "experience" you get from Apple products and platforms, that's not the case when it comes to QuickTime videos on the web. Watching videos from the Apple movie trailer page on only a quarter of my 15" screen, when the content is encoded for HD, is not my idea of a great web experience. It's no wonder that content owners don't use the QuickTime plugin for playback of their web based videos. Steve, you need to fix this. We deserve fullscreen video.