The term “3-D” has been largely synonymous with Hollywood blockbusters, buttered popcorn and ill-fitting cardboard glasses since the 1950s, when three-dimensionality was introduced to draw TV owners into theaters.

Over the past 20 years, 3-D-capable devices like set-top boxes as well as 3-D programming have become available at home. A lack of standard broadcasting formats, relatively little content and the need for 3-D glasses, however, have kept it from a broad audience.

Tech companies are betting that will all change, and when it does, you’ll be able to lose the glasses.

According to new data from Thomson Reuters, 3-D-related patents have risen sharply in recent years, led by companies such as Samsung, Panasonic and Toshiba. “It will only be a matter of time before 3-D televisions start showing up in the home,” the report says.

Patent activity in the 3-D television space grew 69 percent over a five-year period, with more than 1,000 unique invention patents filed last year alone. This year is on par, with 486 filed in the first half of 2009.

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Hollywood stars are going virtual, in the latest effort to jazz up the printed word–and wake up consumers who have become inured to traditional ads.

Hearst Corp.’s Esquire magazine will pepper its December issue with markers that trigger interactive video segments featuring cover subject Robert Downey Jr. and other actors, as well as an ad for Lexus. In doing so, Esquire is taking advantage of an emerging technology called augmented reality, which mixes real-life images with graphics or other effects. TV networks use AR to make the yellow first-down lines on football fields.

The cover and several pages of the Esquire issue include square stickers with black-and-white designs. People can hold the magazine up to a Web camera to trigger the video segments, which are similar to some video-conferencing technologies in their lifelike quality.

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Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN unveiled its new Web site Thursday evening in a presentation that was part Hollywood and part Apple (AAPL).

All week long, the network had been touting the event, dubbed “The Unveiling.” Top CNN executives and invited reporters packed a corporate screening room on the 10th floor of the Time Warner Center as KC Estenson, CNN.com’s general manager, took the stage. He looked like somewhat like Steve Jobs in a dark sweater, jeans and wireless microphone.

“It is a revolution for us,” Mr. Estenson said, as he flashed the first glimpse of the new CNN.com, which goes live on Monday. “This is a really special event.”

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Cult musician Mojo Nixon hasn’t had a hit in years, but he’s moved over a million songs at Amazon.com (AMZN) so far this month.

The artist, who calls his revved-up rockabilly sound “psychobilly,” earlier this year cooked up a scheme to put almost his entire catalog up on Amazon.com, for free. “I’m losing a little bit of money in the short run,” Mr. Nixon says. But “in the long run, there is going to be much bigger Mojo awareness.” He and his online distributor, The Orchard, hope the move will lead to bigger sales and other opportunities, such as licensing more of his songs to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Mr. Nixon, who was hoping to get just 10,000 or so downloads out of the scheme, says he is very happy with the outcome so far.

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Ever since Atari paid $21 million for the rights to make a videogame based on “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”–and then gave a programmer just six weeks to make it–there’s been a disconnect between Hollywood and the videogame world.

Sure, Hollywood makes movies out of games, and vice versa. But rarely do the two worlds meet in a collaborative way.

French game publisher Ubisoft–which has worked with John McTiernan on the “Tom Clancy Splinter Cell” games, Peter Jackson on the “King Kong” game and, most recently, James Cameron on the “Avatar” game–is moving to change all that.

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A slate of new Hollywood science-fiction films share a common vision: In the future, we will become a race of puppet masters. As expected, Hollywood’s take on brain puppetry isn’t exactly true to the current research. But the shortcuts taken by filmmakers highlight the promise, and the challenges, central to the bizarre new discipline of mind over matter.

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Can Hollywood improve on a Beatles classic? Director Robert Zemeckis and Disney evidently hope to do just that with a 3-D remake of Yellow Submarine. The 1968 cartoon featured McCartney-Lennon gems including “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” in a fantasy involving grumpy grownup types called Blue Meanies.

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In the complex tango between movies and video games, Hollywood may be losing its lead.

Motion picture studios have had a penchant for adapting games into movies all the way back to 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.,” which starred Bob Hoskins as the mustachioed hero Mario and Dennis Hopper as the villainous King Koopa, with varying degrees of success.

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If the world seems to turn faster with each passing month, then don’t be surprised that the weekend box office has now shrunk to a single day: Friday. The rise of social networking, studio executives say, is driving a near-instantaneous word of mouth effect that is doing much to hyper-charge Hollywood’s multi-million-dollar marketing efforts…or to defeat them a lot faster than usual.

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Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama’s presidential bid? The Justice Department, a steady ally for the entertainment industry on copyright issues during the Bush administration, today opposed the studios in a potentially precedent-setting dispute with Cablevision over TV recording services.

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RealNetworks (RNWK) is upping the ante in litigation seeking to prevent it from distributing DVD-copying software. The company argues the Hollywood studios are a “price-fixing cartel” that have no right to prevent consumers from duplicating the movie discs.

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Starting late last year, movie studios began peddling premium-priced DVDs that come with the right to download a digital copy of the movie onto a computer.

Now a federal judge will weigh in on whether the studios are the only ones who can legally make those copies, or if other companies can jump on the bandwagon.

Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday will open a hearing to evaluate whether RealNetworks (RNWK) can sell a computer program called RealDVD that allows consumers to copy DVDs onto computers.

Last fall, the studios won a temporary ban on the sale of RealDVD. If Judge Patel rules the program can go back on the market, it could hamper Hollywood’s efforts to cash in on consumer demand for digital copies of the DVDs they buy.

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I have just seen what may end up being a cinematic landmark. It’s called “State of Play,” and it’s coming to a theater near you (if you happen to live in the U.S.) Friday, April 17.

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Hollywood and the major record labels have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with new media, alternating between roses and lawsuits for online entrepreneurs, if you will. Lately, it was looking a little like love was going to win. Hulu, after all, had convinced its detractors that even big dinosaurs can get things right, and record labels had started to embrace services like MySpace Music and Last.fm. But like an alcoholic who just can’t resist that drink, big media looks ready to relapse.

There’s been a lot of bad news out of the so-called Music 2.0 space this week, with Imeem said to be in financial trouble, and Last.fm forcing some of its subscribers to cough up around $4 per month. There’s also a storm brewing in the online video world, where some networks have started to take their most valuable content offline in order to maximize traditional revenue, and platforms like Hulu are being forced to fight any attempt to bring online content to the living room.

Record labels used to be something like the suicidal canary in the coal mine for Hollywood, eagerly moving from one life-threatening disaster to another.

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During a long career as a television and technology executive, Mitch Berman has tried to sell several different iterations of TV, often in their formative stages. These included premium cable networks (at HBO), original cable programming (E! Entertainment Television), satellite TV (Sky and Foxtel), interactivity (OpenTV), and video on demand (Arris). Now, Berman is onto the next new thing, delivering TV through the Internet. His company, ZillionTV, faces long odds but has at least three advantages over the increasingly crowded field of online TV players: It brings DVD-quality programming straight to the TV set. It has a remote control that sets a new standard for ease of use. And its advertising model actually encourages people to watch commercials, rather than undermining their value to advertisers and programmers. Berman is positioning it as a service that offers unique benefits to consumers, advertisers, content companies and broadband providers. Here’s hoping the Hollywood studios that own a piece of Zillion don’t strangle it in its crib, which they could easily do….

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