Gotuit Good News

I got an email from Gotuit the other day about the latest enhanced video site they’re enabling. In this case the news is about a Luke Bryan video remix site (apparently he’s a singer with EMI’s Capitol Records Nashville), but the press release was highly reminiscent of several other Gotuit announcements. In other words, not very interesting, except for the fact that it piles on one more example of Gotuit’s latest success. In September the company announced a deal with the FOX Reality Channel and with Sports Illustrated for the 2007 Heisman Watch site.

Using the announcement as an excuse to revisit the Gotuit website, I found that behind the scenes they appears to be making changes. The company site has been completely revamped to target business customers only, not consumers. Smart. It’s a lot cleaner and quite slick looking. I don’t know anything about the company’s financials, but focusing on a B2B audience has always seemed its most promising route. Rather than fight the consumer video wars, Gotuit is establishing itself as a trusted content delivery system at a time when the business world is just starting to scratch the service of online video applications. I see huge growth potential.

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TiVo Series3 Multi-Room Viewing Is Here! (sort of)

While twiddling my thumbs waiting for the official Multi-Room Viewing (MRV) and TiVoToGo (TTG), I went ahead and cobbled together my own very nice MRV solution.

I’ve read online that the max distance for a non-amplified HDMI cable run may not meet my needs, but quite a few vendors offer long HDMI cables. So I took the plunge and paid $51.01 (including shipping) for Monoprice’s most expensive 35′ HDMI cable. That allowed the living room Series3 to power the 42″ plasma locally via component, while simultaneously powering the 30″ bedroom HDTV via HDMI (with the help of a $5 13/16″ drill bit) as shown below. Video and audio come through very well, and there’s no indication that the source TiVo is out of range.

The next challenge is remotely controlling the TiVo… And at the same time this plan was percolating, Monster offered me their Harmony-powered IR+RF remote (AVL300) for review (MSRP $400). I’ve programmed it to control the bedroom TV via IR and the livingroom Series3 via RF. Response through the walls and around corners has been instantaneous, again with no indication the TiVo is located somewhere else.

Overall, this solution is very nice. I’m enjoying the immediate playback from a remote DVR, including HD content… unlike TiVo’s Multi-Room Viewing which doesn’t always stream (standard def content) real-time without having to wait for the buffer to build. I also like the idea of having one DVR to manage, though I’m limited to recording on the two Series3 tuners. (I still have a Humax DVD-burning TiVo in the bedroom… for now.)

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NAB Takes Low Blow At RIAA

Normally, I don’t really care for all of the politics that go on in Washington, but even I can appreciate the irony of the NAB taking a swipe at the RIAA. You know things are getting crazy when big media starts to turn to cannibalism. Apparently, the RIAA wants to start charging radio stations for … Read more

TiVo PayPerPost Update: Program Killed

TiVo has pulled the plug on their PayPerPost advertising program. Following this forum thread, it appears that TiVo did intend to have a 5 second “bumper” on each video indicating it was a paid/sponsored clip – either TiVo or PayPerPost dropped the ball in delivering (and explaining) that asset to participants in a timely fashion. … Read more

First Two Season Passes Dropped

Prior to recording even the first episode, I dropped Bionic Woman. And after watching the debut last night of Discovery’s Last One Standing… I dropped it too. LOS is a reality show in which 6 athletes are shipped around the world to participate in “tribal games.” The problem is about half the locales/games involve combat … Read more

Where’s The Retail Moxi?

While (still) sifting through my accumulation of mail, I caught this Moxi ad in Wired. The moxi.com/wired link redirects to Digeo’s Moxi home page… where there’s no news on their upcoming retail DVRs. Reading between the lines, one could assume the Moxi boxes are either running behind schedule and/or will be making an appearance in … Read more

TiVo “Hooks Up” With PayPerPost

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of different TiVo marketing campaigns. Some of them have been great and some of them have been bombs, but TiVo has never been afraid of taking risks, especially when it comes to generating publicity. Whether it was their funeral for the VCR or their ad throwing a TV exec out a window, they’ve been able to get pretty good bang for their buck, from the social web.

Despite my normal enthusiasm for TiVo’s PR stunts, their latest campaign has been a little over the top, for even my tastes. It started in late August, when TiVo issued a press release that declared that their new TiVo HD box, had all the features that people expect from a perfect companion. When I first read the release it was so syrupy, I could barely finish it.

I even almost wrote a snarky blog post, where I was going to point out that despite their claims, I’m actually looking for something a little bit different from my “hook ups”, then the family friendly criteria that they included in the PR fluff. Things like someone who won’t freeze up on me after I had been out drinking with the boys or someone with a pair of really big hard drives or a companion that doesn’t get jealous when I play video games.

I ended up getting distracted and never wrote my post, but when I saw TiVo issue another lovefest press release, I just rolled my eyes and figured that I was in the wrong demographic to ever understand this one.

Normally, I wouldn’t have thought much more about this campaign, except while I was surfing YouTube, I came across several clips that appeared to be fan made videos expressing their excitement for the HD TiVo product. At first I actually thought that these were made by TiVo customers. There is definitely an indie feel to them. One of them actually does an amusing simulation of the world from TiVo’s perspective It wasn’t until I got to my my favorite video of the bunch that I finally figured out why there was such a sudden rush of TiVo videos on YouTube. Of all the clips out there, this is the only one that I could find, that was honest enough to at least identify that it’s part of the PayPerPost program.

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