Provides: Automates video production of PowerPoint/Keynote presentations /> Developer: Singular Software /> System Requirements: OS X 10.6, Intel processors only, Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 or 7.0.3, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 or newer /> Review Device: iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 13” Macbook Pro /> Price: $249.00 (30 day trial available) /> Availability: Out now

Presto is one of those amazing bits of software that works like you imagined computers worked when you were a kid. You load stuff in, hit a button, and bing! You get the desired result. I’m exaggerating only slightly here; with only a few kinks, Presto takes movies of people giving PowerPoint/Keynote presentations and produces professional-looking composite footage that highlights both the speaker and the slides.

Every year at our Structure conference, we host a Launchpad for startups. It’s fun for the startups, it’s good for the investors who want to see what’s new, and it’s also a chance for the audience to see what’s coming on the horizon. But this year, we decided to give the final 10 startups that are chosen to present a bit more: We teamed up with venture firm Sequoia to give them a pre-launch hands-on training session at Sequoia HQ.

During that time, the participating finalists will learn how to pitch properly and learn the basics of good interpersonal skills at Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road headquarters. Once that’s all done, they’ll hop up onstage on June 20 to present their ideas to our audience of about 900 investors, executives, media and fellow entrepreneurs and more than 20,000 online video viewers. Check out last year’s finalists here, and read about DotCloud, the eventual winner.

If you are a startup in stealth mode, with a product, or just think you are all that and bag of chips, and you want in on the stage time and Sequoia session, then get busy and apply today! The deadline to apply for the Launchpad is May 16, although we’d love to see your application sooner. We’ll disclose the finalists on May 29 and you will present on June 20 at the Mission Bay Conference center in San Francisco.

At the show you’ll have the chance to meet some of our awesome speakers such as Werner Vogels of Amazon, Steve Herrod of VMware, and executives from Microsoft, Rackspace, and more. Plus, we’ll have cookies. And who doesn’t like cookies? Entrepreneurs, you still have a week, so check out the application and get busy.

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You can now stream hit Twentieth Century Fox -produced TV series including How I Met Your Mother and Glee in Portugese and Spanish within 43 Latin American countries. You can watch Fox movies like Wall Street and Office Space, too … provided you have the broadband capability.

That latter component is a major infrastructural issue as Netflix continues to aggressively expand its Latin American streaming operation. Only 20 percent of Brazil’s 42 million internet users, for example, have a connection speed above 500 kilobytes per second, according to a report released last year by Ibope Nielsen Online. But it takes a speed of around 800 kilobytes per second to stream movies.

Also read: Why Netflix can still win

Still, despite significant hurdles like this one, Netflix announced yet another major Latin American pay TV content deal, bringing Fox’s series and movies into the region’s streaming portfolio.

Under the agreement, all past seasons of Fox-produced TV shows including  24, Prison Break, The X-Files and Arrested Development will be available for viewing beginning July 15, as well as current and past seasons of How I Met Your Mother, Glee and Bones.

In addition,  Fox films including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Wall Street and Office Space will come to Netflix on July 1, with more films and TV series to be added over the next few years.

In its first-quarter conference call with investors on April 23, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings conceded that his company’s expansion into Latin America, Brazil and the Caribbean, which began last September, faces a number of hurdles beyond just broadband development. Consumers in the region are unfamiliar with the concept of over-the-top services, for one thing, and basic tasks such as orchestrating payment through recurring credit/debit card transactions is problematic given the developing states of local banking systems.

Still, despite some pushback from the investor community, Netflix keeps plugging away with content deals. In the first quarter, for example, the company added CBS Corp. TV shows including Dexter and Charmed to its Latin American slate; Disney animated hits Gnomeo & Juliet and The Incredibles also debued on the service, while the Weinstein Company’s Oscar-winning film The Artist is slated to make a second-quarter bow.

For a subscription-based media company like Netflix, which must keep adding customers in order to survive, Latin America could ultimately prove to be salvation. On Tuesday, for example, another U.S. media business facing stagnant U.S. subscriber growth, DirecTV, announced that it had added another 593,000 Latin American subscribers in the first quarter.

But delivering satellite signals to the developing region is one thin,g and broadband is quite another.

Asked about competition from over-the-top services in the region during DirecTV’s earnings call, company chief Michael White said it wasn’t much of a concern given the level of broadband penetration.

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While expansion into Latin America hasn’t proven easy for subscription-based U.S. media service providers, DirecTV is beginning to provide examples of the payoff.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based satellite TV service company reported Tuesday that it added 593,000 subscribers in Latin America during the first quarter. Its revenue from the region also increased by 33 percent to nearly $1.5 billion during the quarter.

Also read: DirecTV aims to double Latin American revenue to $10B in 5 years

The Q1 performance follows a similar uptick of 590,000 Latin American subscribers for the fourth quarter. It also comes amid slowing subscriber growth for DirecTV in the U.S. — the company added only 81,000 domestic customers in Q1, off from investor forecasts of around 92,000.

For the three months that ended March 31, DirecTV’s total revenue rose to $7.05 billion from $6.32 billion a year earlier, principally due to the increase in Latin American subscriptions. DirecTV ended the first quarter with 20 million subscribers in the U.S. and 8.5 million in Latin America. Last year, Latin America accounted for $5.1 billion of DirecTV’s total global revenue of $27.2 billion — a portion that could grow dramatically in 2012.

Netflix, for one, has mentioned DirecTV as a model as it incurs greater-than-expected time and cost to itself expand into Latin America.

“If you look at DirecTV, it took them a number of years to gain their market position, and now they have an extremely valuable franchise,” noted Netflix CEO Reed Hastings during his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January.

Still, the investment community seems unimpressed by DirecTV’s huge subscriber gains in a sprawling, diversified region that is economically underdeveloped in many areas.

“DirecTV’s Latin American businesses are subject to significant macroeconomic risks,” warned Sanford Bernstein cable and satellite analyst Craig Moffett in a letter to investors Tuesday.

In late-day trading on the Nasdaq, DirecTV stock was only up about one tenth of 1 percent to $48.02.

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Sennheiser—known for their range of high end headphones and earphones—has announced some new additions to their lineup of TRAVEL Bluetooth-enabled on ear headphones. These new models offer enhanced streaming audio sound by utilizing the Apt-X codec, which aims to provide better sound in streaming application. The Apt-X audio codec offers audiophile-level sound even in streaming situations where bandwidth is at a premium, such as when listening to tunes via Bluetooth. Like the previous MM models, these updated cans are compatible with any Bluetooth-enabled devices supporting A2DP and HFP/HSP; this list includes computers, smartphones (iPhone 3G and above), tablets (iPad included), and some MP3 players (most iPod Touch models are included).

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95386" title="mm_550-x_-_shoot_4-2" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/mm_550-x_-_shoot_4-2.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="357" />The TRAVEL series with the Apt-X codec includes:

• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;line-height: 31px">MM 450-/550-X: offer NoiseGard noise canceling, TalkThrough sound processing SRS Wow HD processing (550-X only)
• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;line-height: 31px">MM 400-/500-X: offer Bluetooth 2.1 with Apt-X, and up to 20 hours of talk time

It is important to note that no Apple products include native support for the Apt-X codec. Sennheiser sells aniDevice dongle that allows Apt-X compression and streaming, as well as a USB dongle that does the same thing for computer-based listening systems. These devices are, of course, sold separately. All the headphones are on-ear and offer some level of sound isolation (either active noise cancellation or passive sound isolation).

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Comcast Tower

We’re at a flashpoint in the evolution of television, and the battle lines are getting clearer. We have the pay TV providers who want to keep their high-dollar cable packages going even as broadband has the potential to break their bundle of channels. We also have content companies, some of whom are owned by the cable providers and others who are independent. All are trying to make the most money from their content even as digitization opens up new markets and risks associated with piracy.

Finally we have new content companies and delivery options that include big names like Apple, Netflix and YouTube to smaller names like Funny or Die and Aereo. And in the middle is the consumer. All consumers want is their television — whatever they want to watch when the want it. Also, they’d like it on multiple devices and most are happy to pay for this content either directly, through a subscription or by watching ads.

But this market has incredible distortions thanks to a variety of ownership structures, business models and how much control they have over the deliver of content into the home. And no one has more power and is taking as active a stance in this business as Comcast. From its early days of blocking P2P traffic to the most recent allegations of traffic prioritization let’s look at Comcast’s historical, current and future efforts to protect its business.

Blocking P2P: Back in 2007 an engineer looking for barbershop quartet recordings (really!) via P2P noticed that Comcast was actively blocking the files. Much back and forth ensued and the end result was the FCC slapped Comcast on the wrist, ordering it to come up with a way of managing its network that didn’t seem designed to protect its TV business. As a side note, on appeal Comcast managed to throw the FCC’s ability to even regulate the content on the Internet into doubt.

Implementing data caps: Soon after it’s brush with the FCC over P2P blocking, Comcast decided more subtle ways of protecting its TV business were in order, and so it implemented a 250 GB per month data cap. It did so without a meter and with a promise that as web usage increased it would revisit the cap. Surprisingly, even though web usage has increased, it has stayed true to the 250 GB. Customers do have a meter though.

The Level 3 peering fight: In 2010 Level 3 Communications, the middle-mile Internet provider that is also a content delivery network for Netflix, accused Comcast of seeking an additional payment from Level 3 in order for the CDN to deliver content from its network to Comcast subscribers. In effect Level 3 was saying Comcast was trying to charge it more to deliver its CDN traffic. The timing was interesting since Level 3 had recently signed up to carry Netflix traffic. Was it a form of peering extortion to hurt Netflix? To this day we have no idea.

Protecting its Xfinity traffic over the Xbox (and Tivo) from its cap: This combines the limiting power of the broadband cap with a “protected” class of content that happens to be set aside for pay TV subscribers by Comcast over certified hardware. I’ve explained why this is problematic, but the short answer is, the cap creates an incentive for a user to turn first to Comcast’s Xfinity service as opposed to an over-the-top provider.

Prioritizing its own traffic over other traffic at the packet level: Two recent blog posts illustrate Comcast’s efforts in this manner. On Saturday Bryan Berg the founder and CTO at Mixed Media Labs wrote a very clear explanation of how Comcast was tagging its packets for the Xfinity service as opposed to other traffic. On Monday Dan Rayburn, an expert on streaming media, published a similar report that also noted Comcast’s prioritization plans and noted that the FCC and the Department of Justice might find Comcast’s actions troubling giving the conditions on which it approved the Comcast NBC-Universal merger. I’m sure they’ll get right on that.

As a side note, what Comcast is doing here isn’t all that different from other ISPs that try to deliver IP video. For example, AT&T at one point basically allocated a set amount of bandwidth on its pipe for its U-verse television, leaving the rest for the “Internet.” But if the Internet pipe became congested, traffic didn’t cross over into the reserved U-verse section. I have no idea if AT&T is still managing its traffic that way today, however.

Will FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski help save OTT TV?

It’s secretive plans with Verizon: This hasn’t happened yet, because the FCC has yet to approve the deal that would net Verizon spectrum owned by the cable companies and would create a Joint Operating Entity that would share technology. Opponents of the deal are concerned that any approval allowing the creation of this JOE will in effect give the two companies tacit permission to collude on technological barriers for over the top providers. Others are worried they could come up with some kind of deal that allows Xfinity traffic or Comcast’s own subscription video service Steampix to run on Verizon’s mobile network without hitting caps.

It’s possible influence on making Hulu authenticated: Something else that hasn’t happened yet, but should be looked at very closely. Comcast now owns a portion of Hulu thanks to its purchase of NBC-Universal and rumor has it that it may be pushing to have Hulu become a service available only to pay TV subscribers. Just like NBC’s full, real-time viewing of the Olympics will also be limited to pay TV providers.

So there you have it. Comcast is ready for the fight with over the top providers and it’s playing to win. Sony seems to think it’s not even worth fighting over. Unless regulators get involved, I bet fewer customers will cut the cord, or see real television competition from OTT providers. Of course, I may be wrong. The web does have some good content.

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Airtime, the social video startup founded by Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, is going to publicly launch on June 5, according to a tweet the company sent out Tuesday.

We look forward to saying hello on June 5th. Sign up to be first in line. airtime.com—
Airtime (@airtime_inc) May 08, 2012

Airtime has been operating more or less in stealth mode, but the company is said to take the idea of Chatroulette to the next level, pairing strangers for real-time video communication and sharing. However, it looks like the site will be less about anonymous interaction, and more about getting to know people. Airtime is currently doing a closed beta test with around 4,000 monthly active users, according to data from its Facebook app.

The company recently redesigned its website, and its terms of service include references to sharing video, text and pictures. Additionally, some bits and pieces found on Google suggest that users may be able to watch live video streams together.

Airtime received around $8 million in funding, and its website lists “Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun, and Michael Arrington” as investors.

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Last month saw six small U.S. carriers begin offering the iPhone for the first time, and it appears that another round of expansion to similar carriers is coming on May 18. Three new iPhone carriers, all operating CDMA networks, have rolled out their announcements so far today:

- Bluegrass Cellular (Kentucky)

- Golden State Cellular (California)

- Nex-Tech Wireless (Kansas)

As with other regional carriers, the new entrants will be offering the iPhone at $50 below the standard pricing available through Apple and the major carriers. Under the discounted pricing, the iPhone 4S will be priced at $149/$249/$349 and the iPhone 4 will be available for $49.

Given the small nature of the carriers announcing their iPhone launches, publicity is somewhat unorganized and we’re asking readers to let us know if they spot word of any others involved in this round of launches.

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Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental

Elemental Technologies has raised $13 million to expand internationally, but the really cool story behind this company is that it is selling its GPU-transcoding servers to everyone from ESPN.com and HBO Go to Comcast. This makes Elemental the arms dealer in the war between the pay TV providers, the content folks and streaming companies such as Netflix. To put it in every venture capitalist’s favorite terms: If this is the gold rush, then Elemental is the company selling the tools.

Perhaps this is why Norwest Venture Partners led the $13-million-funding and joined existing investors General Catalyst, Voyager Capital and Steamboat Ventures in the round. Elemental sells servers packed with the graphics processors sold by Nvidia. The specialty gear is able to convert videos to any format quickly and without wasting a of power. The secret is the use of the common GPU chips that PC gamers use. Because the chips are sold to a wide-consumer audience they are cheap. And because they are designed to perform thousands of small tasks in parallel they are especially suited for the act of converting a video file from one fit for TV viewing to a smaller one designed to fit on an iPhone.

Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental, explains that the company has 70 employees and is not yet profitable. He was cagey about revenue, saying the five-and-half-year-old company reported sales in the “eight-digits” this year after having sales in the seven digits during 2009 and 2010. When asked how long it would take to get to nine digits he said, “not this year.” Still the company has signed a lot of customers and sees a rosy future ahead of it, especially given the uncertain nature of television in a broadband era.

Blackman says that he believes that many providers are stuck waiting for the regulatory environment to offer a definitive answer to the question of who can control access to the end consumer. For example, says Blackman, if Comcast is allowed to keep its cap other players are likely to avoid trying a Netflix-type model. Blackman doesn’t mind since he’s selling to all comers trying to deliver video to a wide variety of devices, which may be one reason investors are willing to back Elemental, despite a lot of competition. Envivo (which just went public in April), RGBNetworks and others are all offering some form of real-time transcoding to the market.

But Elemental has scored an impressive roster of clients so far, and with this latest round has raised $29.6 million to fund the business. The company also announced that Kevin O’Hara has joined the company as chairman of the board. O’Hara is the current CEO of Integra Telecom and a founder of Level 3 Communications. For those wanting an early look at Elemental, check out this video I did back in 2009 after the company launched.

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