Amazon.com now makes available to the general public its video-on-demand service, through which ad-free movies and TV shows can be streamed on Macs, PCs, and Sony Bravia flat-screen TVs, says Cnet News.

“The ability to watch content instantly without downloading first was among the most requested features of our customers, and now it’s live,” Roy Price, Amazon Video on Demand director, said in a statement.

First tested on a limited number of users, Amazon’s service is now open to all.  Customers can instantly watch movies or TV shows via a Web browser on a PC or Mac.  Amazon is also partnering with Sony to enable users to purchase or rent movies and TV shows directly through Sony’s Bravia Internet Video Link device on the Bravia TV sets.

Amazon will continue to offer movies and TV shows for download via its Unbox application.  User’s TV shows and movies are automatically transferred to their Amazon Your Video Library account, where they can be accessed.

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a report on best practices for making online videos within the boundaries of fair use.  Anyone creating videos that might involve others’ work in some way will find the report informative, guiding them through the copyright law maze, along with the Center’s previous report, Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

Some best practice uses include:

• Commenting on or Critiquing of Copyrighted Material
• Using Copyrighted Material for Illustration or Example
• Capturing Copyrighted Material Incidentally or Accidentally
• Reproducing, Reposting, or Quoting in Order to Memorialize, Preserve, or Rescue and Experience, An Event, or a Cultural Phenomenon
• Copying, Reposting, and Recirculating a Work or Part of a Work for Purposes of Launching a Discussion
• Quoting in Order to Recombine Elements to make a New Work that Depends for its Meaning on (Often Unlikely) Relationships Between the Elements

This guide to best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights, they say.  It’s not a guide to using Creative Commons licenses, material that is already free to use without considering copyright, nor to using material that someone wants to license but cannot trace back to an owner — the so-called “orphan works” problem.

The best practices address the most common situations today.  “Inevitably, online video makers will find themselves in situations that are hybrids of those described… or will develop new practices.  Then, they can be guided by the same basic values of fairness, proportionality, and reasonableness that inform this code of practices.  As community practices develop and become more public, the norms that emerge from these practices will themselves provide additional information on what is fair use.”  [via iLibrarian]

If you are in the market for some personal technology but are feeling the current pinch during this economic downturn, you’ll be interested in PC Magazine’s picks for the 20 best products (rating 3 or better) under $100.

Categories include:

• Mobile Phones and PDAs,
• interesting computer peripherals such as mice, flash drives, and video cams,
• digital photo and video equipment
• MP3 players and headphones,
• and printers.
  

Who doesn’t have a lot of old audio and video tapes around that you would like to move to the latest media?  These DIY tips and instructions from Rick Broida at PC Magazine will get you started off on the right foot.

He suggests that “it’s not too late to resurrect that old content, to free it from its analog cage and make it part of your digital world.  You can turn albums, 45s, and cassettes into iPod-ready MP3s and wrangle VHS tapes onto DVDs.  You may need to invest a few dollars in hardware to make the transition, but at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing that your wedding video and other treasures will live on forever—or at least until today’s media turns old.”

Included are how to turn…

• Tapes to MP3s 
• VHS to DVD
• Vinyl to MP3s 

Videos for Toddlers
Totlol is a new community-moderated video site for “those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years.”  The site provides the type of filtering that most large video sites do not — a way to find age-appropriate videos that the youngest family members will enjoy.

The embedded videos are based on the YouTube API.  [via Google Blogoscoped]

Field Guide to Firefox 3
Tuesday is the big day when the final version of Firefox 3 is ready for download.  Ready to help you enjoy all its new features is the Field Guide. 

“The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice… Overall the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet,” they say.

Pew report: More people using Internet for campaign news
During this 2008 election time, “a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others,” reports the Pew Internet & American Life Project. 

Three online activities are especially notable:  35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos — nearly triple the number during the 2004 race;  10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved; and 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2% during the entire 2004 campaign.

Firefox 3.0 to be released June 17
Mozilla developer center says that after more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, the much anticipated next version of Firefox will be ready for download on June 17.  This new version is purported to be faster and include a number of useful new features.

They are hoping for a Guinness world record-breaking download day.

Learn basic web design skills with video tutorials
Is an instructional video worth 10,000 words? 

Mashable highlights some video tutorials that show you right on your computer screen how to do just about anything you want.  Create your first website or your own WordPress theme.

I recently noted that there is now a TV set-top box called the Roku that Netflix members can purchase for $99 and get video downloads from Netflix’s “watch now” selection.

Here is one of the first reviews I’ve seen of the Roku.  Robert Green concludes that “this little box is exactly what I’ve been wanting on those nights where the notebook computer heat is too much on the lap in bed.”  Or maybe you just like the big screen TV for movie viewing instead of your small screen PC on which you could now view the instant downloads without the Roku.

Green was satisfied with the video quality.  He found getting started relatively quick and easy — check out his post for detailed information about set-up and connection. 

Unfortunately, if you are a frequent user of the site, you may find the selection too limited very quickly even though it contains over 10,000 possible choices.  First you have to create your “watch instantly” queue so you can select what you want to view from it.  And, by the way, those of us who use Firefox almost exclusively will get a message that the browser is incompatible — switch to IE, where once on the “watch instantly” site a video quality test is automatically run and reported to you.

In order to get the instant downloads free, you have to maintain a subscription to Netflix’s mailed DVDs which you can still receive in accordance with your plan.  There is a minimum, so check this out before you jump on the Roku bandwagon.

Green concludes that the Roku pros are:  streams video, cheap, easy setup, easy to use, good quality; and the cons are:  limited selection, requires fast broadband for high quality, no hard drive.

Upload Picasa photos to Flickr
A new and improved version of Picasa2Flickr has been released, according to Lifehacker. 

For those of us who use Picasa to store and make edits to photos on our hard drives, but like to share them on Flickr, this is good news.  Picasa2Flickr is a free Windows-only plug-in that sends selected photos directly to Flickr Upoadr 3.0.

YouTube Annotations
YouTube added a new feature for video creators: video annotations, reports the Google Operating System blog which shows some interesting examples.

“Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to add background information about the video, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene) or link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.”

When you have videos uploaded to YouTube, you can add annotations by going to your list and clicking on “Edit annotations,” or by visiting one of your videos while you are logged in.  There are three types of annotations that can be added while playing the video: speech bubbles, notes and spotlights.

 Adobe Systems Inc. launched a new version of its document sharing software Acrobat, and this time it can package videos, reports Wired.

Acrobat works across different hardware and operating systems, making it an extremely useful document packaging software.  With the addition of video-enabling Flash to Acrobat version 9, users can now include rich media in PDF files that can be read by anyone who has the free Adobe Reader installed.

With Acrobat 9 Pro, for instance, users could package a Power Point presentation not just with images, but also with an audio of the presenter’s voice.  “You can now send someone a presentation that speaks on its own all through a PDF,” said Adobe spokesman Kevin M. Lynch.

Adobe also launched Acrobat.com, which will host Web-based software services to support document creation and sharing.

Several versions of Acrobat 9 are for sale.  Take a look at this chart to compare the features available in each. 

Common Craft’s new video explains social media “in plain English.”  As always, the video is both simple and clever, and completely achieves its goal of explaining the phenomenon of social media.