I’ve never used a Tivo, but I hear good things, especially with respect to its on-screen guide. I have subscribed to Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, and I can tell you that their on-screen guides are basic at best, junk at worst. There’s more than 1,000 channels, and the best you can do is break that into “Sports” and “Entertainment and Music”? Gee, thanks. I bring all of this up because Macrovision (of all people) has said, “You know what, yeah, those on-screen guides could use a new coat of paint, and then some. There has to be more you can do than merely diving those 1,000 channels into “News and Information” and “Movies.” So let’s make a new, better guide, tap into the Internet, and call it a day. Oh, and let’s also change our name to Rovi.” And it did.

Yes, as of today, Macrovision has changed its name to Rovi. The change coincides with a big re-think of what the company is, and what it wants to be. I spoke to a few of the guys (well, one guy) the other day, and he laid it out for me: whereas Macrovision had become synonymous with preventing people from copying media (I had to use an old, pre-Macrovision VCR to rip a scene from a Simpsons DVD in high school), Rovi is more focused on organizing your thousand-channel TV listings, or making sense of Internet-derived audio/video content. Or, simply, it’s focused on building a better guide, for you. The guide’s codename is Liquid.

And now some screens to show what I’m talking about.

There’s your main TV listings. Rather than what DirecTV does, of showing the next several hours all on a flat plane with no distinguishing characteristics, what’s airing right now is given preferential treatment, with later time blacks fading away from the eye. That you can actually see the show, or at least a screenshot, you’re hovering over is a nice touch.

And here’s a more photo-oriented guide. It has a very Plex look about it, which just goes to show you how professional such homebrew applications have become.

And here’s a show close-up. From here, you’ll be able to branch out to find other, similar TV shows or movies, or, say, find all TV shows or movies starring a particular actor. So you’re watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on one channel, and wouldn’t you know it, Glory is airing two hours from now on another channel.

So it all looks very nice, yes.

And another thing I’d like to highlight: friend recommendations. Surely you have several online “friends” (from something like Flixster) whose movie tastes sync with your own. Well, the idea here is that you’d anoint a few of them with the ability to recommend you TV shows and movies. You’re a fan of Seinfeld but never gave Arrested Development a try? Surely a friend will point you in that direction.

Now, when is all this coming out? Not for a little while yet, sometime early next year. The idea is to partner up with TV manufacturers so that Liquid, or whatever the final name ends up being, comes pre-installed.

EA Sports will release FIFA 10 on October 2 for every system ever created by man, including the PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS. (It’ll be the last FIFA game for the PS2.) Wayne Rooney will be on the cover of the UK version of the game, but I have no idea who will be on the American version. Lord knows MLS isn’t exactly a world-class league.

The game’s manager mode has been given a new coat of paint, giving people the opportunity to play the role of José Mourinho, Sir Alex Ferguson, or that Catalan wonder-kid, Josep Guardiola. Presumably this is to fend off competiton from the likes of Football Manager.

The supplied screenshots are a little out of date, but I’m sure that’ll be fixed in no time. For example, Barça’s away kit this year is some weird pink color, not yellow (that was last year’s). Also, Benzema is, as we all know, a Real Madrid player now.

via GamersReports

While we’re all thrilled to see Google throw a new coat of paint onto the Linux kernel, there are, in fact, other things going on Out There, like, say, the quickly evolving PSP. Yesterday’s exotic rumor suggested that Sony is working on a full-fledged PSP2, a system with Xbox1-level graphics. Today I spy an interview with a Sony so-and-so that attempts to explain the company’s rationale for the PSP Go, how PSN compares to XBL these days, and so forth.

The highlights (kids today only have attention spans for highlights):

• Again, the PSP Go isn’t meant to replace the PSP-3000; not everyone in the world has access to broadband, and some people just like having physical media.

• The plan is to have every game from here on out available digitally (via the PSN or store-bought download cards… not every 16-year-old can use his father’s credit card to buy stuff online).

• Yes, Sony wants to bring as many PSOne games to the PSN as it can.

• A PS3 download service is a little harder to pull off than the Xbox 360 download service for the simple reason that PS3 games come on Blu-ray discs while Xbox 360 games are DVD-like. It’s harder to download, and store, 50GB than it is to download and store 9GB.

• Sony thinks PSN isn’t as “behind” XBL as it was, say, two years ago.

• There’s no plans yet for HD video/movie streaming on the PS3