38% of American Homes Are Connected to Internet TV (IPTV!)

IPTVThis bodes well for the Dr. Bill.TV show! And, all the Techpodcasts Network shows! The future of IPTV is so bright, I gotta wear shades!

TV Sets Are Connected to the Internet In 38% of Homes

“Nearly two fifths (38%) of all households have at least one television set connected to the Internet, up from 30% last year, and 24% two years ago, according to a new study from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) reports.

The TVs could be sets with their own connection or could be connected via a video game system, a Blu-ray player, an Apple TV or Roku set-top box. These findings are based on a survey of 1,251 households nationwide that was primarily conducted in February of 2012 and are part of a new LRG study, ‘Emerging Video Services VI.’

In another sign of the growing importance of video games in delivering video into the homes, video game systems were the primary connection, with 28% of all households owning a video game system connected to the Internet. Just 4% of all households are connected solely via an Internet-enabled TV set, and Apple TV or Roku set-tops are the only connected devices in 1% of all households.

While the study found growing penetration of connected devices it did not find that this shift in viewing patterns was impacting multichannel subscriptions.

Overall, 1.6% of households were not subscribing to the multichannel service but had subscribed to one in the past year. In addition, just 0.1% of the sample who dropped service in the past year and do not plan to subscribe again in the next six months, told researchers say that they don’t subscribe because of Netflix or because they can watch all that they want on the Internet or in other ways.

‘Video is increasingly being watched on different platforms and in different places, yet these emerging video services still generally act as complements to traditional television viewing and services rather than as substitutes,’ said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. ‘Among all adults, reported time spent watching TV is similar to last year, and there remains little evidence of a significant trend in consumers ‘cutting the cord’ to their multi-channel video services to watch video solely via these emerging services.'”

The TRUTH About the Mac Virus!

People are gloating that the Mac finally has a serious virus threat. Thing is, it is really a Java threat that effects the Mac in certain specific cases. So chill, you guys!

What you need to know about the Flashback trojan

“On April 4, Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web published strong evidence that more than 500,000 Macs have been infected by the latest variant of the Flashback trojan. As Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at F-Secure pointed out via Twitter, if there are roughly 45 million Macs out there, Flashback would now have infected more than 1 percent of them, making Flashback roughly as common for Mac as Conficker was for Windows. Flashback appears to be the most widespread Mac malware we’ve seen since the days when viruses were spread on infected floppy disks; it could be the single most significant malware infection to ever hit the Mac community.

Here’s what you need to know about Flashback, what you can do about it, and what it means for the future of Mac security.

Flashback is the name for a malicious software program discovered in September 2011 that tried to trick users into installing it by masquerading as an installer for Adobe Flash. (Antivirus vendor Intego believes Flashback was created by the same people behind the MacDefender attack that hit last year.) While the original version of Flashback and its initial variants relied on users to install them, this new form is what’s called in the security business a drive-by download: Rather than needing a user to install it, Flashback uses an unpatched Java vulnerability to install itself.”

And, you can read the whole artcle at the link above!