No two ways about it, this movie looks pretty cool. And speaking of the number two, we’ve got two, count ‘em, two trailers from it to share with you today so you know just how cool it is.

Set in Viking Britain in 871 AD, Hammer of the Gods is “a visceral, intense tale set in a world whose only language is violence. A young Viking warrior, Steinar (Charlie Bewley), is sent by his father the king on a quest to find his estranged brother, who was banished from the kingdom many years before.

Steinar’s epic journey across terrifyingly hostile territory gradually sees him emerge as the man his father wants him to be – the ruthless and unforgiving successor to his throne.” See what we mean?

Magnet Releasing will release Hammer of the Gods on VOD/iTunes May 30 and in theaters July 5. Check out both trailer after the break. Which one do you like better?

Continue Reading →

Well, well, how things are changing. Not to be left behind as the paradigm shifts from traditional cable and satellite networks towards what paid subscription services like Apple, Hulu and Netflix are doing, YouTube today announced the first channels that it will offer via monthly subscriptions.

Following a 14-day free trial period, channels such as Sesame Street, Baby First Plus, Cars.tv, HD Net, Coreman’s Drive-In and UFC Select will be available for monthly fees raging from $2.99/Month to as little as $.99/Month. Payment will be accepted via credit card or Google Wallet.

According to the announcement, some of the programs will feature ads, but a majority won’t, with most of the content being available as on-demand. Google will reportedly collect about 45% of the subscription ad revenue.

While this list of channels and programming is not that extensive yet, Google expects other channels and networks to launch subscription services on YouTube soon and will roll them out over the coming months. For the full list of content available now, go here.

With the current amount and diversity of content, it will be very interesting to see if people actually decide to subscribe to some of these channels or wait until there’s more to choose from. Will this development end up being the digital straw that breaks the virtual camels back and starts the mass exodus from more traditional cable and satellite providers? It just might be.

Using an iPhone or iPad to read books via Amazon’s Kindle App? If so, you will want to hold off on upgrading to the latest version of the app, which was released on Tuesday. That is, if you don’t want your content accidentally erased from your iOS device.

Don’t worry, even if this does happen. the content is still safe in Amazon’s cloud. What it really means is that Kindle app on your iOS device will be reset and you will have to , basically, start over again from scratch by entering your mazon account information and then downloading your content again.

“We have identified an issue with the app update that may cause your app to become deregistered,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “To register, enter your Amazon account e-mail address and password and all your Amazon content will be available in the cloud. We have submitted an update fix for this issue and are working with Apple to release.”

Bummer. At least, if this does happen, all your content isn’t permanently gone. It’s more of a pain than a catastrophe.

Two of our favorite actresses working today are Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie. So, to have them both in one movie is quite the accomplishment and makes us very interested in said movie.

The movie in question is the indie romantic comedy Save the Date. In case you’re not familiar, the movie is based on the graphic novels written by Jeffrey Brown and reportedly was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

You can check the movie out online today via IFC Films Video on Demand, SundanceNow, iTunes, Amazon Streaming, Google Play, Xbox Zune and PS3 PlayStation Unlimited. It will also hit theaters on December 14th.

Check out the trailer after the break. We love it. Let us know what you think.

Continue Reading →

Hot on the virtual heels of Hulu Plus arriving for users of the Apple TV, Amazon today released an app for the iPad which allows users to stream content from its library of movie and TV titles. Curious timing, eh?

The new app is capable of streaming Amazon Prime content for free (with a $79 a year Amazon Prime membership of course) as well as allowing users to download content for later offline viewing. Season Pass is also available for TV programs with episodes available the morning after the show airs on TV.

Here’s a full list of features:

• Stream thousands of titles available from Prime Instant Video at no additional cost with a Prime membership, or watch over 120,000 videos available from the Amazon Instant Video store
• Download purchased and rented videos from Your Video Library
• Shop over 120,000 videos available from the Amazon Instant Video store by visiting Amazon
• Add videos to your Watchlist from a PC, Mac, or Kindle Fire for later viewing on your iPad
• Subscribe to a TV Season Pass by visiting Amazon and episodes will automatically be available on your iPad the day after they air
• Start watching on your iPad, and resume watching right where you left off on a Kindle Fire, PS3, PC, Mac, or hundreds of models of connected TVs and Blu-ray players with Amazon Whispersync.

The new app is available for the iPad over at the iTunes App Store.

Until today, if you used Apple’s Apple TV device, you were pretty much limited to programming via iTunes or Netflix. One other service that was conspicuously absent was Hulu Plus.

No longer. AS of today, according to a mention over at Hulu’s blog, the Hulu Plus service is now available to users using the new Apple TV. It also features detailed instructions on how to enable the service on the device including a way to set up the charge for the service using your iTunes account.

Hulu Plus streams a variety of TV shows including current and old series from ABC, NBC, FOX, The CW and Univision. It’s not as great for movies but the selection has been improving over the last few months. Perhaps it’s time to give it a try again?

If you’re a fan of the Angry Birds series of games for iOS and Android you might wonder where game maker Rovio goes once it runs out of places to take its signature birds and pigs. Well, wonder no more because the company today announced a new game called Amazing Alex that continues the tradition of physics-based puzzels and takes them to a whole new level.

Here’s the scoop from Rovio:

Amazing Alex has a set of 35 fully interactive objects just waiting to be set in motion. Fans can set the objects up to bounce, pop, ricochet, bash, and crash into each other and create an elaborate Rube Goldberg device! With a houseful of toys to play with, there’s more than one right answer.

Fans can share their most creative solutions with friends and see what they came up with. With 100 challenging levels across four fun-filled locations, there’s a whole world of creations to explore!

The game is available now for $0.99 in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. Check out a trailer for it after the break.

Continue Reading →

It’s 1995 and your Steve Jobs. You’ve left Apple after a bitter struggle with the guy you brought in to help run the company. You’ve founded a new company, NeXT, which will one day become one of the main building blocks of the most successful tech company in the world.

But what are you thinking?

Well, if you’re interested in what Steve Jobs was thinking at that time, you’re in luck because Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is now at iTunes for you to watch, enjoy and learn from. Here’s bit more on the interview itself:

In the interview Jobs talks about his pioneering days with Steve Wozniak, when they built a Blue Box and phoned the Pope; how they – “two guys who didn’t know much” — assembled the first Apple computer and went on to found the Apple company. “I was worth around a million dollars when I was 23, over 10 million dollars when I was 24 and over 100 million dollars when I was 25 – and it wasn’t really important!”

As a Mac OS X user, I’ve moved away from Apple’s Safari web browser and have been using Google’s Chrome for pretty much all of my daily browsing. It works very well, for the most part. But until today, one thing has been missing in the seamless Chrome experience: the Chrome browser on the iPhone and iPad.

Fortunately, Google has remedied that issue and announced Chrome for the iPhone and iPad during day two of its I/O conference in San Francisco. Chrome for iPhone and iPad, which needs iOS version 4.3 or higher, will be available later today.

Another new thing Google announced today which I’m particularly excited for is the Google Drive app for iOS. With the Drive app on iOS, you can open PDFs, photos, videos, documents and anything else stored in your Drive while you’re on the go. You can also search all your files, share them with collaborators, and make files available offline.

That last bit is really cool. Offline files is an awesome development which makes this service even better. No internet connection? Don’t worry, just make changes to your document and the next time you have a connection, it will sync. Awesome.

More from Google’s I/O event as it comes to us. In the meantime, I’m hitting refresh on the iTunes Store until Chrome is available for download.

As far as music services go, iTunes has pretty much been the dominant player for several years. However, Spotify has made great strides and has become a personal favorite of many members of The Flickcast staff. But as good as the service is, there’s been something lacking: an iPad app.

Fortunately, the company is changing that today. That’s right, Spotify has announced that its iPad application is now available in Apple’s App Store. The free app allows premium Spotify subscribers to access the services huge library of music, stream tracks and playlists, and share songs.

The new Spotify iPad app also features gapless playback, a crossfade function and AirPlay integration, allowing users to stream music wirelessly from the iPad to AirPlay-compatible devices. In other words, if your an ipad and Spotify user, this is just the thing you’ve been waiting for.

On a side note, if you’re a Spotify user and want to listen to music at home I highly recomment pairing the service with some Sonos speakers. The Sonos Play 5 / Spotify combo is really hard to beat.

Check out a video highlighting all the new features of Spotify for iPad, as well as the full press release, after the break.

Continue Reading →

Developing apps for the iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices is a booming business. There’s also money to be made developing apps for the Mac and Mac OS X as well.

There’s so much to gain, and Apple wants to keep developers as happy as they can, that the company holds an annual developer’s conference in San Francisco to make sure everyone is on the same page and to help developers get all the tools they need to create great apps. In fact, the company just announced that its Worldwide Developer Conference will take place in San Francisco from June 11th to June 15th.

For the event, Apple is providing over 100 sessions on iOS and OS X, in addition to a student scholarship program. If you’re a first-time developer of apps for the iPhone or a seasoned veteran, this even surely offers a great deal of useful information and contact building.

Read on for all the details from Apple’s official press release.

Continue Reading →

Remember back before we had multi-billion dollar movies in theaters showcasing our favorite heroes doing the things we had them doing with action figures in your garage decades ago? Just me? Probably, but that doesn’t mean most of you didn’t want to do the same, and now DC and LEGO are giving you the chance to do it in style with their brand new app, LEGO Super Heroes Movie Maker.

The app is to celebrate the new marriage of LEGO and Warner Bros.’ famed DC list of characters, in the DC Super Heroes line of toys and video games. The app works pretty simply, but is also perfect for those with a good amount of time and patience. Here’s how they break it down.

Bring the LEGO DC Universe Super Heroes to life with the LEGO DC Super Heroes Movie Maker. The free app lets you bring your blocks to life using simple tools and guides that make it easy to shoot, edit, even score your movie with music. Add one of the customizable title cards and share your directorial debut online.

You can get the app now for free in the iTunes App Store, or just wait for it to hit your non-iPhone sometimes soon. In the meantime, check out their trailer for the app after the jump.

Continue Reading →

For screenwriters in Hollywood and elsewhere, the usual software tool for writing that million dollar screenplay is Final Draft. The software has been around for years, is used by most every TV and film production, and currently sits at version 8.0.

Of course, now that devices like the iPad are so popular, many writers (myself included) are wishing for a version of Final Draft that will run on it. I’m pretty sure that piece of software is coming. The pent up demand is there, it’s just a matter of time before it’s satisfied.

In the mantime, the makers of Final Draft have seen fit to release the Final Draft Reader application for the iPad. And while it isn’t a fully-featured screenplay writing app, what it does do, it does quite well.

Continue Reading →

Back in the early days of non-linear video editing Avid was the king. Their software was used in pretty much every situation and they dominated the post-production landscape for film and TV.

Then, Apple came out with Final Cut Pro and things changed. Plus, Avid ended up having some issues of its own which hindered it further.

Now, with Apple having issues with Final Cut Pro X, Avid has released its first application to compete with Apple’s iMovie mobile. The app is called Avid Studio for the iPad and is currently available in the App Store for an introductory price of $4.99. After 30 days it will increase to $8.

With this app just being released, its too early to tell if it will knock Apple’s iMovie off its perch as the iOS editing app du jour. However, it does have some nice features and a few iMovie doesn’t have, so chances are people will at least give it a chance — especially at that low price point.

Big day for Apple and the education market today as our favorite fruit-flavored tech company revealed at an event in New York City that it will, as we discussed last week, be getting into the textbook publishing business in a big way. Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller announced several new components of the initiative including iTunes U as a separate iOS app, which gives users of Apple’s new iBooks 2 iOS app access to textbooks from several top publishers to be read on the iPad.

The new textbooks are modern and interactive instead of plain old paper. They support multitouch gestures and also feature dictionary look-up integration and annotation. Students can even highlight text, take notes and create virtual note cards to reference later while studying. Wish this was around when I was in school.

At launch, high school-level textbooks are available in the iBookstore and priced at $14.99 or less. Expect more textbooks to come along in the near future. The first group of publishers with textbooks available for the iPad include Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Continue Reading →