Staten Island Residents Get PhotoShowTV

Time Warner Cable quietly launched PhotoShowTV in Staten Island last week. I say quietly because it appears there was very little press coverage. Granted the service was already operating in Hawaii, but this is the first time PhotoShowTV has been available on the mainland, so to speak. And it’s a very cool service.

SimpleStar’s PhotoShow has been around for quite a while as a simple tool for creating photo slideshows with music, graphics and even some animations. (Comcast subscribers can download the Deluxe version on Comcast.net) The TV part comes in with the combination of PhotoShow and Time Warner’s VOD service. Staten Island TWC subscribers can now create PhotoShows online and then submit them for public viewing on a local VOD station. In other words, what you create in your living room can be watched on Grandma’s TV screen across town.

Of course the new service will be more compelling when it has national reach, but already PhotoShowTV has won industry recognition. Cable executives at the CableLabs Winter Conference Innovation Showcase chose PhotoShow as the “best new idea or most likely to succeed company.”

I saw PhotoShowTV at DEMO last fall and must admit it has appeal. Certainly the application gives SimpleStar a nice differentiator over other applications like Scrapblog and Smilebox, and maybe even this year’s DEMO star, Vuvox.