NBC has announced that Jimmy Fallon will be testing out his hosting chops in a trial run online this fall before debuting over the airwaves as the new host of 'Late Night' in the spring.

Broadcast networks and cable channels typically air their top programs first and then redistribute them online through their own Web sites, video streaming sites like Joost or Hulu, and online download stores such as iTunes. According to show producer Lorne Michaels, who has helmed 'Saturday Night Live' almost nonstop since it began in 1975 (and which also launched Fallon to national fame), the online-only effort will also allow Fallon to try out his material and get into a rhythm. The first Web performances will last only five to ten minutes.

In a game of late night comedy musical chairs, Fallon will be replacing Conan O'Brien at the 12:30 a.m. slot on NBC's schedule, and O'Brien will replace Jay Leno on 'The Tonight Show,' which starts at 11:30 p.m. on weeknights.

The freedom of being online is one of the reasons Michaels stated for putting Fallon on the Web before sending him before a live studio audience, although they won't be pushing decency boundaries too far. "I think we're our own censors," he said.

We'll see. We figure Fallon will probably be a hoot on that traditionally funny time 12:30 a.m. time slot, Web-tryout or not. We just hope that Conan doesn't stop being funny when he takes over the much more mainstream 'Tonight Show' lose a mere hour earlier. [Source: New York Times.]

What we're watching tonight:

• TNT (1080i) continues the NBA Playoffs with Mavericks/Hornets at 7 p.m., followed by Suns/Spurs
• ABC (720p) has 'According to Jim' at 8 p.m., along with 'Dancing With the Stars' and the return of 'Women's Murder Club'
• NBC (1080i) has a new 'Law & Order: SVU at 10 p.m.
• CBS (1080i) has a new 'NCIS' at 8 p.m., followed by the return of 'Shark' at 9 p.m.
• CW (1080i) brings a new episode of 'Reaper' at 9 p.m.
• ESPN HD (720p) has 'E:60 'at 8 p.m.
• ESPN2 HD (720p) presents 'The Streak' at 9 p.m.
• Fox (720p) has 'American Idol'at 8 p.m.
• Versus (1080i) tosses in Penguins/Rangers at 7 p.m. and Red Wings/Avalanche at 10 p.m.
• Discover (1080i) has 'Deadliest Catch' at 9 p.m. followed by 'The Alaska Experiment'

Just when you though HANNSpree's idiotic and pointless LCD stylings couldn't be topped, here comes HANNSpree to do it again. The company just launched a 15-inch "Starlight Blue" display in the UK, comprised of some of the worst sci-fi-inspired curves known to man, in conjunction with a bit of pretty princess glitter to complete the atrocious effect. Should you happen to accidentally bring this XGA display home for the £99 ($197 US) asking price, we recommend a burning with fire. [Source: Pocket-light]

Like one of the undead characters from the '90s hit TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the WB Network is rising from the grave. Yet this time its incarnation will be solely online and targeted to the 16-to-34 year girls and women with a penchant for the 'Slayer' and other former WB Network broadcast shows. The shows, including the likes of 'Gilmore Girls,' 'Smallville,' 'The O.C.' and 'Friends,' will be free to view and entirely advertising supported.

TheWB.com and KidsWB.com will both have original content, some of it developed by Charlie's Angels movie director Joseph "McG" McGinty Nichol and also Josh Schwartz, executive producer of 'The O.C.' and 'Gossip Girl.' [Source: The New York Times]

Disclosure: Warner Television and Switched share a corporate parent, AOL/Time Warner.

3-D baby, that's what we've wanted from home television for 50 years. Now it's yours... if you live in Japan anyway. Introducing the world's first 46-inch 3-D stereoscopic television (which is essentially a fancy name for a 3-D television that requires glasses to view properly). Many companies are working on TVs capable of displaying 3-D -- ideal for video games for example -- but it looks like this one is the first one that's actually for sale.

Built by Hyundai, the 1,920 x 1,080 set is capable of grabbing BS11 3-D broadcasts pumped by Nippon BS in Japan for the last few months. The ¥498,000 (about $4,857) LCD brings 2x HDMI and 3x composite inputs (to name a few) and apparently works fine for traditional 2-D broadcasts.

Unfortunately, you'll have to wear what appear to be 3-foot wide, 3-D glasses judging by the image provided above. Perhaps they're meant as a radiation shield since the set is also the world's first TV with built-in "nuclear reactor" according to the machine translated text. Be careful out there kids, it's just television.

From Impress (via Engadget)

Here's a secret that high-end audio and video companies don't want you to know -- those $10 HDMI cables from a generic manufacturer are just as good as their $50 top of the line counterparts.

In fact, the tech site CNET has been using "high-end" $20 cables from Monoprice in its labs for testing top of the line TVs from companies such as Samsung and Sony. And trust us, CNET abuses those cables more than you ever could in your standard home theater set up.

The truth of the matter is that as far as digital signals are concerned, the quality of the cable matters very little. Used in HDTV and most satellite and cable systems these days, digital signals don't degrade as quickly and aren't subject to interference the same way that analog signals are.

So, unless you plan on running 20- and 30-foot cables around your house, or are building an audio or video production studio, you can stick to those cheaper $10 HDMI cables and will still get nothing but a top quality image.

From CNET

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Actress Rachel Miner got her first big break in the' 80s when Woody Allen picked her for a role in 'Alice.' Since then, Rachel has been steadily working in television and the movies. She acted for years on daytime soap-opera 'Guiding Light,' and also appeared in hit TV series like 'Sex and the City' and 'CSI.'

She is currently starring in Showtime's new series 'Californication' -- also starring David Duchovony -- where she plays the role of Dani California, a secretary with double-crossing tendencies. Rachel got back to us with answers to the Switched Questionnaire. Although she's decidedly old-school when it comes to gaming, Rachel knows her way around the newest gadgets and is a huge music fan.

What gadgets do you always bring with you to the set for down-time?

My iPod, in fact I'll sometimes listen to it right up to the point the camera is set to role. The music really helps me stay focussed on the scene ahead. Downside is, when I do so, I sometimes am less aware of the environment around me. I'm not sure sure if it looks very sane to the people around me when I am bouncing around to music they can't hear. Oh well.


What cell phone do you have right now and what do you love/hate about it?

I have a Helio. I get service absolutely everywhere -- seriously, even inside elevators in underground parking lots. I guess I have a bit of a love hate relationship with the cute chirping sounds it makes when I dial. I think they're adorable, but they can bit intrusive when I'm in a quiet room surrounded by other people, I should probably turn that feature off, but it's so darn cute.


Who's the last person you sent a text message to and what was it about?

My boyfriend, some lovely dovey text. Yes... I am a girl, sorry.


Where do you go pretty much every time you get online?

I'm a huge fan of dictionaryreference.com... basically because I'm a geek. I also really dig TV's Top Five on AOL, basically cause I don't actually watch tv much and it keeps me from being a social outcast who doesn't know what's going on.


What annoys you most about your iPod, cell phone, or laptop?

They don't listen to reason! Try as I might to debate the finer points of why my laptop, iPod and cell phone should obey my every whim they so often blindly refuses to do what I ask despite the logic of my argument.


Name one thing you wish your iPod/cellphone/laptop could do that it doesn't do now?

Bedsides obey my every whim? Well, I guess it would be awesome if they cleaned my house too and had buttons which could pause time so I could actually have an opportunity to respond to all my messages without it taking up my whole day.


What upcoming gadget can you not wait to get your hands on?

I know I'll want whatever the next generation of Mac laptops is. Isn't that the game, every-time I think I'm up to date I go into the Mac store and there's a new computer that that's ten times cooler then the one I have. That and even though it's already out I still want a Roomba. I saw an ad for that and it looks so cool. I told you I want a computer that cleans my house.


You're stranded on a desert island: What gadget do you bring? (Give reason why.)

My cell phone, and a solar power charger. Does that defeat the question? Obviously I wouldn't be stranded for long in that case.


What's the most-played song or artist on your iPod?

It rotates, but my current top played list includes: The Pretenders, Otis Redding, Pulp, U2, Pixies, Spiritualized, David Bowie, Sigar Ros, Damien Rice, Postal Service, The Verve, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Travis, The Cranberries, Chris Isaak, Firewater, The Band, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Peter Gabriel, Muddy Waters, and just discovered 'Maps' by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.

Yes, I have eclectic taste. The songs on my ipod range from Alice in Chains to Irish Folk music.


BlackBerry, Sidekick, or Treo?

Wow, I'm lame still using my cell phone to make calls and text message, I seriously need to catch up.


Are you getting an iPhone-if so, why?

At some point probably, love all the nifty features. I mean with what other phone could you spy on your friends houses from a birds eye view? Seriously, though it seems like an really fun useful gadget and it's cool looking.


What's the longest time you've ever spent playing a video game in one sitting and what game was it?

Your going to have to time warp back with me to the week that Super Mario Brothers 3 came out on the original Nintendo. Just to save face though, I have played video games since. Really liking 'Rock Band' and 'Wii sports.' But just haven't had the same kind of free time that I had when I was 10.


Mac or PC?

Mac. It's prettier and it explains things to me in cute symbols I don't have to have an IQ to understand. Honestly, can't make heads or tales of PC's.


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You know those annoying pro-cable commercials that always talk about how awful or expensive it is to install a satellite dish, and how comparatively easy, cheap, and dependable cable is? Yeah, well, they don't have anything on this story out of Sedalia, Missouri, where a husband has admitted to shooting his wife during the install of a home satellite TV system.

Amazingly the husband, Ronald Long, was trying to use a .22-caliber pistol to shoot a hole through the wall in the couple's home to enable them to run a wire through to the television. His first shot was apparently unsuccessful in penetrating the wall and his second shot somehow hit his wife in the chest, 34-year-old Patsy Long. She was pronounced dead on Saturday night.

Ronald could now be charged with manslaughter, though prosecutors haven't confirmed whether that is their intention. It also remains to be seen whether the cable companies will start filming new ads about these new potential dangers of satellite dish installation, but we wouldn't put it past them.

In related news, and just in general, we'd like to know this: When will gadgets stop killing people!?

From KHQA

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Of course you want to watch the Super Bowl in HDTV. Who doesn't? It seems the lead up to the big game is the second biggest driver of high-definition LCD TV sales for Amazon.com, according to the e-tailer's latest numbers. (The biggest driver is, of course, holiday season gift giving.)

So which TV leads the pack? The mantle this time goes to Samsung and its $2,199 52-inch 1080p LNT5265F set.

Samsung also dominates this top 10 list, with four of the spots. Sharp has three, Sony two and Toshiba just one. All but one of these TV sets is 1080p and all but two are larger than 40-inches. (Do we see the continued trend here? Go big and get the highest resolution you can.)

We're going to watch the game on a 42-inch Toshiba, but maybe we'll listen to one quarter of it on the radio -- and imagine what the game action looks like, just as in the olden days.

From Gearlog.

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Well, we all knew it was coming. The rumors have been circulating for so long that it's more been a matter of when rather than if.

At today's MacWorld keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that he has finally struck a deal to put movie rentals on iTunes. Pretty much all the major movie studios --Touchstone, MGM, Miramax, Lions Gate, Fox, WB, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony -- have all signed on to provide rentals at $2.99 for older films and $3.99 for new releases.

Like pretty much every other online movie service and Vudu, the iTunes movie rental service, which launches today, gives you 30 days to watch a chosen film, but after you hit play, you have just 24 hours to complete the movie before your rental expires. The files can be transfered to iPods and Apple TVs, though, so you can start watching the movie while it's still downloading your computer's iTunes, then copy it over to your iPod (or Apple TV) and finish watching it somewhere else later that day.

Apple also unveiled Apple TV Take 2, which essentially amounts to a new interface for the Apple TV that makes it independent of a computer. The update lets you access the full iTunes store directly from your Apple TV and rent DVD-quality movies to watch on your TV (or buy music and audiobooks to listen to on your TV/home theater system). And, for just a dollar more, you can get HD quality video and 5.1 surround sound. The Apple TV will still sync to your PC or Mac, if you have one. The revamped Apple TV ships in two weeks for $229.

The best part is that current Apple TV users aren't left out in the cold. Jobs admitted that Apple hadn't exactly hit the nail on the head with the original Apple TV, and is offering the new UI and features as a free download to all current Apple TV users. For once, some of Apple's early adopters are getting taken care of!

So, does this mean you should forget Blu-ray and just pick up a new Apple TV? Maybe, though we're going to reserve our final judgment until we find out whether the HD offered is highest-quality 1080p or not (as with Blu-ray) and if every one of the 1,000 or so films Apple is promising to have available by year's end is also available in HD.

That said, we won't say don't rent movies from iTunes. We've got iPods just like everyone else, and we'd be dumb not to partake of this latest offering from Apple. We just want to see if Apple really has a decent selection of HD movies, since no one else -- other than the Blu-ray camp (and only recently) -- seems to have pulled this off.

From Engadget

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The market for HDTVs is flooded with competing technologies and not to mention perplexing acronyms and abbreviations -- DLP, LCD, OLED, Plasma, SED. Now you can add Laser TV to your list of display technologies to know. Mitsubishi unveiled a 65-inch laser television at an event during this week's CES -- and people at this week's CES show were buzzing about the incredible color and contrast.

Mitsubishi isn't revealing details about exactly how it works, but we do know it is based on a rear projection system, meaning that this is never going to be as thin as those sexy OLEDs on display. And who knows what the future holds for big and bulky projection TVs, whose stars are falling almost as quickly as those of HD-DVD. But the laser TV does have a leg up in the image quality department. Apparently, colors were so intense and contrast so dramatic that Greg Adler at PC World described it as "artificial" looking.

Pricing isn't available, but Mitsubishi plans to have the displays on the market by fall of 2008.

From Engadget

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Most of us never think twice about our car stereos. They come preinstalled in your automobile, and you take it for granted. But there is a whole subculture of people whose greatest pleasure in life is crafting absurd mobile entertainment centers that put many peoples' home theaters to shame.

TVs galore, more sub-woofers than your bowels could possibly stand, and chains of amplifiers that drive volume up to building crumbling levels -- these are some of the specs we encountered while walking the mobile tech areas at CES.

We may well have suffered permanent hearing damage to bring you this massive photo collection of the most intense displays of car audio and video power at CES. A few of them even made this guy's stereo look tame by comparison. Take a look!

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We couldn't stop drooling long enough for the Samsung reps to let us near this lust-worthy beauty. Thankfully, the folks over at Engadget were able pick there jaws up off the floor and snag some photos of this ultra thin, environmentally-friendly display.

It's only a prototype right now, and Samsung has no immediate plans to bring these to consumers, but we're sure plans will be announced soon enough. Samsung won't want to leave Sony alone in the OLED market for long, though. So head on over to Engadget to check out what is most certainly the future of TV.

From Engadget

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Often it's customer service that wins consumers' hearts and dollar decisions -- and Sharp yesterday announced a program that (though it hints a bit of Big Brother) could change the way people operate and maintain their TVs.

The program is called Aquos Net, and it's essentially content and customer support provided with two of Sharp's new Aquos LCD TVs, which were also announced yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The SE94 and D74 series Aquos LCD-TVs come with Ethernet ports, which allow for direct connection to the Internet. Web-based content from Weatherbug, NASDAQ, uclick, and Aquos Gallery (basically pretty pictures) can be shown in split- or full-screen, and other content providers will be added soon.

The real prize of this online connection, though, is direct access to Aquos Advantage Advisors, who can remotely diagnose problems with a TV.

To connect to Aquos Advantage Live, a customer uses the Aquos Net Portal Web site to generate a unique identifier for the television. Using this identifier, an Aquos Advantage Advisor then has access to advanced settings and diagnostics. The adviser can support complex setup issues such as remotely checking to see if a Blu-ray Disc player is properly connected.

But not everyone has their Internet connection in the same room as their TV. For these folks, Sharp is marketing a Powerline Communications, or PLC, Adapter (which, if you care, is compatible with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance standard). This product almost deserves its own write up. PLC adapters allow you to establish your Internet connection -- and, for that matter, many other types of content – over the existing electrical lines in the home. This means no Ethernet wire has to be run from one room to another. There's something very appealing about no new wires. Sharp isn't the first company to introduce PLC adapters (look to Panasonic's competing HD-PLC adapters), but it is the first we've noticed that has put these adaptors to such good and practical use.

Sharp PLC adapters will available as single port (HN-VA100U for $149.99) and 4-port adapters (HN-VA400U for $179.99). The company will also sell a starter pack that bundles a single port and 4-port adapter into one package (HN-VA401SU $279.99). The adapters can connect not only to TVs, but also to set-top boxes, gaming consoles, PCs, and routers. The connection is also inherently more secure than a wireless connection. All three PLC adaptors will be available in March.

The SE94 series includes three models: The 65-inch LC-65SE94U, available this month for an MSRP of $10,999.99; the 52-inch LC-52SE94U, available this month for an MSRP of $4,199.99; and the 46-inch LC-46SE94U, available in February for an MSRP of $3,199.99. The D74 series consists of one model, the LC-52D74U which is coming in April for an MSRP of $3,599.99.

Don't worry, we'll get in to more detail on these new high definition LCD panels for you in another post.

For now, just savor the advanced capability promised by Aquos Net. We'd be tempted to purposely mess up our TV's settings just so we could see the remote diagnosis in action.

From Sharp Electronics.

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We all love our HD and our home theater set ups, but all of the wires are certainly a pain, and plenty unsightly. But Westinghouse is hoping to "cut the cord" and usher in the era of wireless HD. The company, known for its quality budget TVs, will be showing off an LCD HDTV with wireless HDMI technology that will allow the television to be mounted anywhere in your house -- without running cable from your set top box. So now you can hide your ugly cable box in a cabinet or in another piece of furniture, and then mount the television across the room. It also means you can wall-mount your TV without unsightly wires.

Of course, no home theater system would be complete with out a surround sound system. And what would a fancy wireless TV be without a fancy wireless audio system? Westinghouse will also be showing a wireless receiver and speakers that have a range of 65-feet and introduce no latency (which can be an issue with wireless) so that the image and audio are always perfectly in sync.

We're looking forward to seeing these wire-free Westies in action to see if they live up to the hype -- check back over the next few days for our hands-on impressions.

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