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Samsung has acquired the Boxee Box hardware as well as its entire team. What can we expect from the pairing of the two companies?

Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” book is a hypnotic rumination on the nature of religion as a source of strength and inspiration but also exploring faith’s common tendency toward allegory as the means to an end. We meet a very spiritual college professor named Pi whose past comes alive in a series of flashbacks as he tells his story to a novelist eager to write his next book. Pi was once shipwrecked and lost at sea for 227 days, already a sufficiently fascinating tale, but to make the ordeal even more extraordinary, he had to share his predicament with a fully grown Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Their surprising relationship is masterfully dramatized in a series of indelible images, their odyssey recounted with an unending sense of wonder and a contagious love for the beauty of nature.

Kai, a young falcon, yearns to spread his wings and explore the world, more specifically an avian community called Zambezia. There he hopes to join the Hurricanes, the skilled and brave flying corps that defends the city. But his father is unalterably opposed to his leaving their safe but boring life for reasons Kai does not at first understand. Kai leaves the nest on his own anyway, joining a flock of geese headed to the fabled bird city. Once there, he finds the city in danger from a terrifying enemy.

Audio quality in streaming video has taken another step forward with the news that the Best Buy–owned CinemaNow service is adopting DTS-HD. Despite the moniker, it is not the same lossless DTS-HD Master Audio that appears on 80 percent of Blu-ray Discs—it’s a slimmed-down streaming-friendly DTS Express codec that delivers 5.1 channels at data rates up to 512 kilobits per second. Consumers will access encoded content through Rovi-powered storefronts that will operate through Samsung’s 2013 smart TVs and Blu-ray players and their ARC-enabled HDMI or optical outputs. DTS-HD is not the only surround game in streaming town: Dolby Digital Plus is in use by Netflix, Vudu, and Amazon Instant Video.