Can you imagine the office somewhere in Microsoft HQ where a team of Xbox staff members have been hunkered down for months, locked in feverish negotiations with countless cable providers, and premium networks all over the world, trying to make their promise of “live TV on Xbox” a reality? Not too many companies would have been able to deliver on such a big promise, but Microsoft announced today that they’ve succeeded. (It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s list of nearly 40 partners is comprised more of video-on-demand services than live TV, but the live stuff is in there.)

AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are the big headliners here in the U.S., but dozens of others have signed on for Xbox owners all over the world. Microsoft’s tactics seem to have been to get anyone and everyone they can onboard with their “New Xbox TV Experience,” as it’s being called, because aside from cable providers, their announced partnerships also include cable networks (like BBC, Bravo, and Syfy), premium networks (HBO), and even individual programs (The Today Show). There are also a number of Internet-based video providers on the list, and it’s a virtual “who’s who” that includes the likes of Crackle, Daily Motion, Epix, Hulu+, Netflix, Vevo, and YouTube.

The New Xbox TV Experience is optimized for Kinect users and enhanced with Bing voice search, so that (as you can see in the video above) all you have to do is tell your Xbox what you want to watch — be it a TV show or a movie — and Bing search will bring up every available instance of it for you to choose from.

Of course, most of this content will only be available to Xbox Live Gold members, and some of them, like HBO Go, have separate subscription fees as well. More than 20 countries will get the New Xbox TV Experience come this Christmas with the next Dashboard update. Users will find deep integration with Facebook and Twitter for social sharing, and as always, users can watch simultaneously with friends across the Internet, and use Kinect’s voice and gestures to control the action.

Check out the screenshots below, and then you’ll find the complete list of Xbox’s new partners at the bottom of this page.

• ABC iView – Australia
• AlloCiné – France, Germany, Spain, U.K.
• Antena 3 – Spain
• Astral Media’s Disney XD – Canada
• AT&T – U.S.
• BBC – U.K.
• Blinkbox – U.K.
• Bravo – U.S.
• BSkyB – U.K.
• Canal+ – France, Spain
• Channel 4 – U.K.
• Channel 5 – U.K.
• CinemaNow (Best Buy) – U.S.
• Comcast – U.S.
• Crackle – Australia, Canada, U.K., U.S.
• Dailymotion – Available in 32 markets
• EPIX – U.S.
• ESPN – U.S.
• Facebook – Available in all 35 Xbox LIVE markets
• FOXTEL – Australia
• GolTV – Spain
• HBO GO – U.S.
• Hulu – Japan
• Hulu+ - U.S.
• iHeartRadio (Clear Channel) – U.S.
• Last.fm - U.K., U.S.
• LOVEFiLM – Germany, U.K.
• Manga Entertainment – U.S.
• Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment/Real Sports – Canada
• MediaSet – Italy
• MSN with MSNBC.com - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, U.K.
• MUZU.TV – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, U.K.
• Netflix - Canada, U.S.
• Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) – Canada
• RTVE – Spain
• SBS On Demand - Australia
• Syfy – U.S.
• Telefonica – Spain
• Televisa – Mexico
• The Today Show - U.S.
• TELUS – Canada
• TMZ – U.S.
• Twitter - Available in all 35 Xbox LIVE markets
• UFC – Canada, U.S.
• Verizon – U.S.
• VEVO – Canada, U.K., U.S.
• VimpelCom – Russia
• Vodafone Portugal – Portugal
• YouTube – Available in 22 markets
• ZDF – Germany
• Zune - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K., U.S.

You can thank me later for these awesome almost 140 minutes of your life you just enriched (or was it lost).

The White House will be utilizing the social aspects of Twitter and YouTube in particular to complement the President’s State of the Union Address. Senior administrative officials in the Obama administration will field questions from Twitter users after the speech, while later in the week Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will also do a question and answer session on the microblogging giant.

The climax of the White House’s State of the Union social media campaign will be a live question and answer video session with President Obama on YouTube.

Injecting a dose of spirituality into the matter was Pope Benedict XVI, who acknowledged that new technologies are allowing Christians to spread the gospel and to connect with others in an ever-expanding variety of ways. He also urged Christian social networkers to maintain a Christian presence online. He warned specifically against creating fake profiles to achieve popularity or settle some matter of ego. (Shamefully, we’re now headed to MySpace to delete our 78 faux Steven Seagal profiles.)

What does this all mean? Probably nothing. Unless a sudden influx of political enthusiasts and/or idle patriots floods Twitter this week, or unless Facebook surges with new Christian profiles in the wake of the Pope’s declarations, we can be fairly sure that these novel events are precisely that: novel events, of not much lasting consequence in terms of the member base of any social media site. After all, hundreds of millions of users are already on Facebook, which is in and of itself beyond a household name – if not a household obsession. Twitter is already processing over 1 billion tweets per month from users all over the globe. It may tickle people to see the President and the Pope on the new media bandwagon, but it’s entirely likely said people will already be wired into social activities online.

But, if nothing else, the endorsement of social networking from the Pontiff and the usage of same by the President will reaffirm the usefulness of social media in connecting people with a common interest or cause. Which is something that should be, given the fact that “social networking” is social by nature, self-evident. However, it’s entirely easy to get lost in the sea of solo status updates and forget that some of the strongest features of social networking involve interacting with others – even some pretty powerful folks, who are coming around.

Muse may not be every geek’s choice when it comes to music, but this one has a thing for Matthew Bellamy and his gang.  One, he does have a British accent (yeah, some are suckers for that).  Two, he is not bad looking at all (ask Kate Hudson).  Three, he is a musical genius! (Maybe I should have listed that first…)

So anyway, a friend posted an 8-bit music video of Muse’s Uprising, and I had so much fun listening to it. Never mind that the magical voice of Bellamy is gone or that the “real” instruments cannot be heard – listening to the melody and being transported back to many many summers ago is so worth it.

Non-Muse fans may just give me a blank stare, but I am taking the chance that are some Muse fans on FG. Here’s that video.

Here’s another song – I think my current favorite: Super Massive Blackhole.

If you want to know more about Muse, you can visit their official web site. (I strongly suggest that you do if you want to listen to awesome music.)

Now what about other songs that you might want to hear in 8-bit? Do a quick search on YouTube – you’ll find lots. From what I have read, I think you can DIY. Does anyone know how to do this exactly? (For those times when you feel like tearing your hair out because of boredom…)

I have no idea why a bunch of people would spend so much time and energy creating something like this. I also know that I certainly would never have the patience to plan this sort of thing out and pull it all together.

But all that matters is that somebody — the NOTsoNOISY crew — did bring 111 individuals together at a movie theater and got them to move from seat to seat for four hours in order to grace YouTube with this utterly brilliant video.

Human Pac-Man is actually the fifth video in a series of “human video game performances” that these guys did. After the jump, I’ve embedded the other four.

The first video they did was Human Pong:

Then, they came up with Human Space Invaders.

As you can tell, these folks have a thing for retro games. Next up was Human Pole Position.

And last but not least (until Human Pac-Man came along), they gave us Human Tetris.

This train wreck defies explanation, but here’s what I can tell you: take the theme song to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and add a singing Trekkie, in uniform — with lyrics he wrote himself. His voice is actually pretty decent. Watch for the toy Enterprise cameo that’s oh-so-realistic.

It’s because of people like this that geeks are such a clichéd punchline. I don’t know whether to laugh or cringe.

I can’t explain why this is so bizarrely funny. It just is.

The video spends way too much time at the beginning watching an empty washing machine spin. It’s around the 50 second mark that the brick is finally tossed in, and that’s when the fun starts.

Is watching a washing machine go bonkers funny or weird? Did you laugh or merely shrug?

Is this some kind of strange alien communication? An encrypted military message?

No, this is what happens when you upload a video to YouTube, download it, and repeat… one thousand times.

The miniscule degradation that occurs every time the video is repeatedly uploaded and compressed adds up over time and ultimately transforms the original creation into something that its creator has decided is a singular work of art. It took YouTube user “canzona” one full year to complete the upload/download process a thousand times over.

The result is something bizarre, psychedelic, and fascinating. If it ain’t geeky, I don’t know what is.

The problem’s simple: it involves a man known from things such as this. Or this and more recently this even.

Here at FG we prefer to remember him for his awesome in Knight Rider though. K.I.T.T.’s awesomeness we mean, pardon the lapsus linguae. If this were the early 80s, we would probably all want to look like this and things could always have been worse.

So before you go ahead and judge me, keep for a second these three factors in mind: 80s, Knight Rider and Dirk Benedict.

Great now I can post this actually totally awesome video and not be worried to be judged. Remember: Dirk Benedict!

Now with Cyborg technology it can’t be long anymore before we can improve the Hoff.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Tarantino but Rodriguez is the more mature director of both. Luckily they worked together regularly, even if on under-rated movies such as Four Rooms or over-hyped movies such as the Grindhouse duo.

This time the honour is Tarantino’s to create a fake trailer for Rodriguez’ upcoming feature film ‘Machete’ but the trailer we are really interested in here at FG is the LEGO version by Youtuber gigerbrick.

LEGO makes everything better. Even Roberto Rodriguez.

Oh, the things people do to be different. Take this guy, for example. He went ahead and created one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, and I highly doubt that anyone anywhere will ever own one of these shirts other than him. Why? Probably because it’s not machine washable, but things with a chipset rarely are.

Anyways, here’s how it works: The gentleman who designed this shirt – Chris Bell with the help of his wife Madeleine – uses an Android phone for his main source of communications. That connects to the t-shirt via a bluetooth dongle on the face, which then connects to an Lilypad Arduino. That in turn lights up a series of LEDs that are connected via conductive thread. Those threads run to screenprinted numbers on the side which show how many messages their are in the inbox. It counts by binary as well, so if he has three messages for example, he’ll have the “2″ and “1″ illuminated.

Check out the video. It’s pretty neat stuff, and it makes me a little bit jealous.

via fashionablygeek.com

Complete Youtube playlist.

Via Fanboy.

Snatch Wars (NSFW) is a mashup of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and Star Wars. NSFW because of the high octane language. Video after the jump.

Remember 8-bit?

Now everything has been mashed up by super Youtuber El Macbee (from 8-Bit Nintendo Dark Knight fame).
Video after the jump.

This YouTube video really has everything needed: Lego, H.G. Wells’s time machine and is awesomely detailled. A must watch even though 12.31 minutes long.

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