Los Gatos, Calif. - Online DVD rental service Netflix (NASD: NFLX) announced on Thursday that it has partnered with Samsung to offer subscribers the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from its website to Samsung BD-P2500 and BD-P2550 Blu-ray disc players. The players will allow Netflix users to browse its catalog from their TV screens, read synopses and rate films, and fast-forward and rewind the video streams.

Milpitas, Calif. - Korean electronics giant Samsung has withdrawn its $5.85 billion offer to acquire SanDisk (NASD: SNDK), the maker of memory cards and MP3 players. "After nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress, we are withdrawing our proposal to acquire SanDisk," Yoon Woo Lee, vice chairman and CEO at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.

London - Shazam, the operator of a mobile music discovery service, announced on Tuesday a deal with Korea's Samsung, to embed its application on Samsung phones, including its new Beatb and Beats handsets. Shazam recently announced 1.5 million downloads of its application for Apple's iPhone.

Santa Clara, Calif. - A consortium of consumer electronics and wireless technology developers -- including Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung -- announced on Wednesday that they have partnered to jointly develop a new industry standard for wireless high-definition video. The WHDI (Wireless Home Digital Interface), a technology developed by Israel-based Amimon that includes a video-modem that operates in the 5GHz unlicensed band, will form the basis of the standard, which the companies hope to complete yet this year.

Seoul, Korea - Korean electronics makers LG and Samsung announced on Wednesday that they have partnered to develop a new mobile TV delivery standard for the North American market, as the standards body for the region prepares to adopt a technology in early 2009.

Seoul – Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest memory chip maker, said today it plans to spend $1.37 billion in 2008 upgrading semiconductor lines, Reuters reports.

Barcelona - Korea's Samsung Electronics, U.K. chip designer ARM and U.S.-based Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) separately announced plans on Monday to introduce mobile products based on Google's (NASD: GOOG) Android mobile phone software platform, with the latter planning to introduce a prototype this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Las Vegas - The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), an alliance of U.S. commercial and public broadcasters aiding the development of mobile digital television, said on Tuesday that it will test two competing technologies in 2008 that use digital broadcast TV spectrum to deliver mobile television signals.

Seoul, South Korea - A group of consumer electronics, technology and broadcast companies have formed dotTV, a consortium that aims to bring interactive elements like social networking and online video to the TV viewing experience.