Research in Motion is launching its new social music service, BBM Music for BlackBerry. Like competing services from Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, or MOG, BBM Music charges customers a monthly fee for the ability to stream music on demand.

But there’s a huge twist with RIM’s model. First, the service costs just $5 per month, which is about half the price of competing services.

Second — you only get to choose 50 songs initially. That’s about four of five albums worth of music. But remember how I said BBM Music was social? If you want to listen to more than 50 songs, all you have to do is add friends. Then you can listen to their music collections at no additional cost.

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The BBC iPlayer service allows British residents to stream television programs to a computer or mobile device for free… or rather, for the price of the license fee everyone pays to use a television in the UK in the first place. And that’s why it’s taken so long for the BBC to offer the iPlayer service outside of the UK — the broadcaster has had to develop a system for offering a non-commercial service within the UK and a different, revenue-generating service in other countries.

Today the BBC begins rolling out iPlayer service beyond the UK. Apple iPad users in 11 European countries can download a new iPad app starting today.

They’ll be able to watch some ad-supported television programs for free, but to gain access to everything offered they’ll have to pay about 7 Euros ($10) per month or 50 Euros ($72) per year.

There’s another key difference between the international app and the service available to British television viewers. In the UK the iPlayer lets you see programs from the last 7 days so that if you miss an episode you can catch up quickly. The international app will be a video-on-demand service with TV shows from as far back as 60 years ago. The BBC will offer 1500 hours of programming at launch with more coming all the time.

The new app will allow users to stream video over WiFi or 3G connections, and users can cache videos for offline viewing.

Today the iPlayer iPad app will hit 11 countries in Europe including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Later this year it will also be available in the US, Canada, and Australia.

The Guardian reports the BBC is running a one-year pilot project. That means eventually we may see apps for other platforms including Android or the web. It also means we may see the whole thing just go away if it the international iPlayer doesn’t make a profit.

I somehow suspect that there are enough fans of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Top Gear alone to make sure that doesn’t happen though.

Online video service Hulu is expanding the number of smartphones that officially support the company’s Android app. A few weeks ago Hulu launched the Hulu Plus app for Android, but at the time it only worked on 6 devices.

Now the HTC Evo 4G, HTC Thunderbolt, and HTC myTouch G2 and 4G phones can also use the app. That brings the total number of supported devices to 10.

Hulu Plus is a subscription-based service which runs $7.99 per month. it allows US customers to watch movies and TV shows including content that’s not available from the company’s free, web-based service. That includes content such as every current-season episode of TV shows from ABC, Fox, and NBC.

Competitor Netflix doesn’t tend to have current seasons of television shows and typically only features episodes from past seasons. Unlike Netflix though, most Hulu programming includes commercials — even if you pay for a subscription.

Sony has released a new streaming music app for Google Android smartphones. It’s called Music Unlimited and it’s powered by the company’s Qriocity streaming music service.

The app is available as a free download from the Android Market, but you’ll need to sign up for a monthly subscription plan to actually stream any music. Sony is offering free 30-day trials, but if you forget to cancel by the end of the month you could find $3.99 to $9.99 on your bill.

The lower priced service allows you to tune into ad-free streaming music channels sorted by genre, era, or mood. The service can also scan your existing music files and allow you to tune into those tracks from any device. Sony calls this service Music Sync. Apple calls it iTunes Match. It’s six of one, a half dozen of the other.

If you spring for the $9.99 per month plan you can listen to any of 7 million songs in the Qriocity library from Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI as well as indie labels. There are also premium channels and a few other goodies for premium subscribers.

Sony’s Qriocity service is available in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.

The international reach helps set Music Unlimited apart from some of its competitors. But mobile internet radio and music-on-demand apps are becoming a dime a dozen. Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, mSpot, Slacker, and Pandora all offer similar services.

The Financial Times has decided to replace its aging mobile applications for iOS, Android and other platforms with a new web app based on HTML 5. The move could pave the way for more web apps based on the latest web standards — but not just because of the new features HTML5 offers. The new web app also offers the FT a way to provide its 600,000 subscribers with access to the news while sidestepping Apple’s rules for subscription-based apps sold in the App Store. Update: While the web app is designed for the iPhone and iPad you may have some luck getting it to work with browsers on some other platforms.

The FT joins a growing number of companies that have expressed displeasure with Apple’s system, where Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue. The move also offers a platform agnostic approach. You can access the web app on any mobile device with a web browser that supports HTML5.

The new web app is free to use until June 14th. You’ll need to pay for a FT.com subscription to keep reading after that, with prices starting at $4.99 per week.

Some users are reporting that the initial load time is tediously slow, but mine was zippy and about as fast as waiting for Mobiputing’s new app for iOS to load. The biggest problem is some unnecessary choppiness when tapping new categories, but the overall speed of the app felt quite fast compared to similar native iOS apps.

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Slacker‘s premium mobile music service is now offering on-demand mobile music streaming for $10 per month.

Slacker’s free music service generates a station for you based on a song or artist and finds more songs based on what you like and what you don’t. The free version was restricted featured ads and a limited number of skips, while a $3.99/month premium version bypassed those restrictions and included offline caching for Slacker’s mobile app.

The new Slacker Premium will cost you an additional $6 per month, but include a host of new features. Slacker Premium will now let you play specific tracks, albums, or artists, as well as create playlists that can stream wirelessly to your device. You can choose these specific tracks using Slacker’s database of millions of songs on demand.

To sign up for either of Slacker’s current premium subscription offerings, head over to Slacker’s official website. The mobile app is available for BlackBerry, iPhone, WebOS and Android.

via IntoMobile

EPIX is a cable channel and web portal with more than 3,000 streaming movies available to subscribers. Now the company is getting ready to expand its horizons with a series of apps for mobile phones, tablets, set-top-boxes, and internet connected TVs.

According to the press release, Google Android and BlackBerry Playbook apps are in the works, as well as versions for Samsung televisions and Blu-ray players and Roku set top boxes. A Google TV app is already available, and Engadget reports that EPIX has confirmed it’s working on an iOS version, but waiting for Apple’s approval.

All of the apps, with the exception of the iOS versions, should be available in the second quarter of 2011.

The one thing that’s always bugged me about EPIX is that you can only access the company’s online video offerings if you subscribe to the TV chanel through your cable, satellite or telephone provider — which can be difficult if your provider doesn’t yet offer EPIX.

The New York Times launched a new version of its iPhone app last week, in advance of the launch of a new paywall which would only allow readers to view 20 articles per month for free on the web, or the the Top News sections for free on a mobile device. I kind of wondered what would happen if you didn’t upgrade to the new app, so when the newspaper company pushed out an updated version of its Android app this weekend I decided not to update.

Now that the paywall is in full effect, I fired up the mobile app and got a warning saying that an upgrade is required. There’s a friendly “Remind Me Later” button, so I tapped that to see if I could keep reading anyway. The answer is yes… if I’m cool with reading yesterday’s news. The old version of the app simply won’t grab any new articles from NYTimes.com. The ads at the bottom of the screen are also going crazy, refreshing about 2-3 times per second.

So the long and short of it is that while there are a number of ways to avoid paying to read The New York Times, using an outdated version of the company’s mobile app is not one of them.

Oh, and it should go without saying, but if you want to support the newspaper, you might actually want to think about paying for a digital or print subscription. Good news doesn’t come cheap. If, on the other hand, you’re not a fan of the way the company is going about its new subscription plans, then there are plenty of other news sources on the web. But subscription-based news apps may be an important part of the future of journalism.

Update: While the older Android app has stopped working, it looks like users with the older iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad app can continue to download and read the latest news stories… for now.