Apple, quickly snatching up copyright material after copyright material for iTunes, has announced that it has inked yet another deal that will allow iPod users to catch college basketball games on the go. Signing a deal with CBS, iTunes will now offer college basketball tournaments at $1.99 a pop.

The NCAA will be entering its championship period starting March 16, so games should be made available within a matter of days. Along with the introduction of the games, Apple is introducing yet another term to its iTunes service. Called Season Pass, makes sense, customers will be able to purchase all 63 games in the series for $19.99.

According to the Chicago Tribune: "It's a great convenience and you get a great deal when buying the Season Pass or Multi-Pass, Eddy Cue, vice president of iTunes said in an interview. Season Pass buyers will get up to 20-minute compilations of the "March Madness'' games the day after they are played as well as full-length versions of the semifinals and championship games, Cue said. CBS will also offer highlights of past NCAA tournament games for $1.99 each, he said."

If you're running Microsoft's Office suite on your Mac, then you know that updates seem few and far between.  Well today's a big day on that front.  Go grab the download and you'll benefit from overall security and stability enhancements across the board.  Additionally, look for some changes to Entourage in the form of Spotlight's ability to query emails and contact information, syncing capabilities, and smart card support.

If you haven't thrown down any green for Microsoft's offering, it may be good to know that TextEdit (part of OS X) can handle the doc format, or OpenOffice.Org is an open source suite that you can install and run (using X11) for free, and can handle all MS Office Suite file formats without a hitch.

Download: [Microsoft Office Update 11.2.3]

Distributor Vital: PIAS represent a huge number of independent record labels both in the US and Europe. Their digital arm has just signed a deal with Apple to start providing music videos for sale through the iTunes Music Store.

Just to give you an idea of the sort of artists this will mean coming to the iTunes Music Store, here's a very short list of some highlights: Oasis, Roots Manuva, Lady Sovereign, Idlewild, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, Death in Vegas, Sigur Ros, Roni Size, UNKLE, Teenage Fanclub, Soulwax, Jurassic 5, Amp Fiddler, Evan Dando and Royskopp.

[Via MacWorld]

SearchForVideo is a new web-based service, aggregating iPod Video-compatible video content from all over the web and sorting into a broad categories: News, Sports, Entertainment, Business, Health and Humor. Videos are published as XML feeds which you can subscribe to via iTunes, keeping a steady stream of new content from all corners of the internet headed into your iPod Video automatically.

There's no quality control, unfortunately - this a 'get what you're given' service.

[Via MacWorld]

British TV news station Sky News have launched their first free video podcasts. The service is starting out with their weekly '7 Days' programme, but will expand to cover other programming in time.

7 Days is Sky News' regular look at the lighter side of the week's news, this week's show (for example) covers the man with bionic arms, an animal version of Big Brother, the stuntman who goes up, up, and away, an Elvis celebration and a soapbox spectacular.

The Sky News video podcasts are pre-formatted for iPod viewing, just subscribe to their podcast through iTunes on this link.

This launch is the first step in a major iPod videocasting strategy from Sky television.

Sky TV, the UK's main satellite television provider (more widespread than cable is in the UK), have announced plans to offer their subscribers video content for download in iPod-friendly format. There will be two services: One open to Sky subscibers with a monthly package costing £34 or more with clips of sports, news and entertainment programmes at no cost, and the other which will allow premium Sky subscribers with a monthly package costing £40.50 or more to download full feature films and sports highlights.

The movie offer is the interesting one here. More than 200 films will be made available at launch growing to 1,000 at a "later date". Spider-Man 2 and Dr Strangelove are expected to be highlights of the initial line-up. Sky are estimating that full-length feature films will take around one hour to download over a 2Mb broadband connection (which is rapidly becoming the standard for UK broadband users).

Once downloaded, films and clips can be stored for 30 days before they are automatically deleted. What is not clear is how exactly that DRM system will be implemented.

The delivery of sports clips is expected to be linked in to Sky's existing online betting service.

[Via VNU Net]

iSquint is a video conversion tool for Mac OS X (Panther and Tiger compatible). It converts most popular video formats, including WMV up to version 8, into iPod and iTunes friendy MPEG4 Quicktime files.

iSquint uses the ffMPEGx engine and provides an easy to use graphical front-end. It works much quicker than Apple's own Quicktime Pro - in fact, on a 1.5GHz G4 it can convert most videos to iPod size in real-time. It can also convert files to a TV-friendly size.

Best of all, iSquint is totally free.

[Download iSquint 1.0]

After having a range of short films for download in iPod-friendly format from the very first day the iPod Video was launched, The Flux now claims to have the first film festival specifically aimed at content for the iPod Video. The call for entries went out today, for films under ten minutes long in four categories: Student film, indie film, family clips, and music video. There's an entry fee of fifteen dollars for budding Spielbergs, Linklaters or Cunninghams, with an additional conversion fee of 20 dollars for anyone who cannot supply their masterwork pre-formatted for iPod viewing. The deadline for entries is January 25th.

From February 1st, selections from the submitted fims will be available for free download from The Flux's website. Viewers can then vote for their favourites online, but there's no word on whether those votes will have any influence on the eventual festival winners.

Here's hoping that this is the first of many incentives to get filmmakers to produce more content specifically for the iPod Video and other mobile devices with small sceens.

There's hundreds of utilities out there which enable you to copy music from your iPod to your computer. Most of them seem a little inelegant though, leaving you feeling that the process should be simpler somehow. If you're a Mac OS X user, Isaac Huang has released a solution which actually feels Mac-like in it's ease-of-use.

Install iPodDisk on your Mac and it makes your iPod show up as if it were an iDisk drive - a read-only virtual hard drive. That's all it does, and all it needs to do. From then on, you can interact with the music on your iPod just as though they were stored on your Mac. Open up a finder window and browse them, copy and paste, play music directly from Finder windows, etc. Search your songs with Spotlight, share the drive over your local network, anything you like. It all just works, in the way you're used to already from OS X's Finder.

iPodDisk is absolutely free, and whilst it is only available for OS X, it even works with Windows-formatted iPods. If you try iPodDisk and find it useful, you might want to send a small contribution to the author for his trouble.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

If you have an iPod handy, but you don't have that spiffy new navigation system found on luxury vehicles, don't fret -- there's an answer for you. Dedicated users of Apple's iPods continue to find ways of making the device useful beyond its awesome music-playing ability.

Two sites on the 'net feature handy little navigational programs that may just come in handy the next time you're on that cross-country road trip, or simply taking a quite drive out to the country.

This user shows you how you can load up Google Map documents on your iPod. You can even toss in a few zoom levels to view the directions from several distances. Another user, meanwhile, offers a free service using a small download that makes the process a little bit easier.

"IPod-iWay is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod Photo. It?s an easy solution for getting Yahoo Map directions saved and displayed onto any iPod Photo or Nano, and without the need of additional software!"

[Via, Google Maps on iPod Photo]
[Via, iPod iWay]