PAX was a win for PlayOn. It gave us a chance to meet our customers, have some fun and spread the word. Here is what people are saying:

Zaxy

The Zaxy gamer girls joined us at our booth. They helped spread the word to existing game console owners and they were a blast to have around!

Battlemouth

Aaron Madrid, the head writer for battlemouth.com went to PAX and checked out our booth. He reviews PlayOn with a sense of humor. Seriously, I hate reading reviews, but Aaron is a master at entertaining his readers. Check it out.

Gamer Reaction

The awesome team from Gamer Reaction came to our booth and asked us some questions. Here is the interview with Chris from Gamer Reaction and David, the Chief Technology Officer for PlayOn.

So take it from these tech savvy bloggers...PlayOn rocks. Download a free 2 week trial or buy PlayOn.

One more thing, don't forget to enter our MLB contest, where you can win a Xbox 360 or PS3 with a 1 year subscription to MLB.tv, MLB 2010 and PlayOn software. Sunday April 4th is the last day to enter. It's simple to enter, download the PlayOn trial and check the box to either Tweet or Facebook update, telling your friends about PlayOn. If you are already a PlayOn user, just Re-Tweet this out "Enter the #PlayOnMLB contest to win a Xbox360/PS3, PlayOn and a year subscription to MLB.tv. Enter at http://bit.ly/aqErt5"

Peter Kafka, a writer for All Things Digital, covered the pricing of cable channels within one of his latest articles. He shares a list of pricing for individual cable channels from industry analyst SNL Kagan through a research note of Barclays Capital Anthony DiClemente. If you are like me and could live without a dozen sports channels on basic cable you might be annoyed at the cost breakdown. Thankfully I cut the cable almost a year ago and therefore only feel slightly annoyed that most my friends and family are being ripped off.

The list of pricing is long. Here is a portion of the pricing, but check out the whole article to see the entire list.

We are so excited to be here at PAX East. The PlayOn team will be there all weekend. We have a booth and will also be live tweeting from the convention with the tags #PlayOn and #PAXEast. Please come to our booth and say hi.

You can watch PlayOn and hang out with the Zaxy gamer girls.  If that is not enough to get you to swing by, then at least come enter our contest for a 46" LCD TV that we will give away at the end of the show. Not going to PAX? Well we don't want to leave you out, so enter to win a Xbox or PS3 with PlayOn, a year subsription to MLB.tv and the MLB 2010 game.

With March Madness in full swing basketball fans everywhere are being less productive. But how long can you really forfeit your productivity without guilt eating away at you? Well a growing number of brilliant men have planned their vasectomies around their favorite sports. According to Oregon Urology Institute vasectomies have seen an increase during March Madness the past two years. Not only did they see an increase, but now they are advertising with “Vas Madness” flyers and a radio ad. The flyers give “Top Ten Reasons to Get Your Vasectomy during Vas Madness” and here they are:

1.   Extended office hours during games
2.   Continuous ESPN coverage in our lobby
3.   FREE snacks while you wait
4.   Our office is much less crowded than a sports bar
5.   Complimentary recovery kit
6.   Doctors orders: 3 days on the couch
7.   Excuse to stay in your bath robe all day
8.   Keep Austin Weird – not overpopulated
9.   You’ll be ready for love in the post season
10.  It’s HIP to get SNIPPED

Dr. Douglas Hoff, a urologist at Oregon Urology Institute said, "I don't know if these were the guys who were on the fence and this pushed them over the edge, or if these are guys who would be doing it anyways.”

We have been listening to what our fans want and many have asked for a contest. Who doesn’t want free stuff?  So to celebrate the compatibility of MLB.tv with PlayOn we have set up an awesome prize pack around Major League Baseball. To enter simply download the free trial of PlayOn and check the box to either Tweet or Facebook update telling your friends about PlayOn.  The lucky winner will get the following:

• Xbox or PS3
• PlayOn Software
• MLB 2010
• 1 year of MLB.tv

Now you can watch every Major League Baseball game using your Xbox360, PS3, or Wii. It's easy and will take you about 5 minutes to set up.

   

Thursday is the kick off of March Madness and the offices of PlayOn have got the basketball bug. So in an attempt to watch our favorite teams (oh yeah and make all of your wildest dreams come true) we have pulled a few all nighters and think that Thursday morning we will have a functional March Madness channel for FREE! We are not 100% sure, but let's say we are confident enough to announce this channel and take the chance of public embarrassment.  Make sure you have downloaded the free trial of PlayOn and get ready for some March Madness!

St Patrick’s Day is less than a week away! If getting sloshed on a Wednesday night is not an option…..then we are here to spread the Irish love.  Here are some ideas that won’t have you stumbling into work on Thursday still smelling like Guinness.  

Netflix Recommendations – After a very scientific office poll, we present to you our favorite Irish movies:

Waking Ned Devine – Set in a small Irish town, Ned has won the lottery and everyone wants a piece of his money. After the town’s people find he has died they enter a pact to scam the officials and split Ned’s winnings.  

Boondock Saints – Two Irish brothers living in Boston believe that it is God’s calling for them to rid the city of evil. Throughout the movie they go on a massive killing spree with local mafia as their victims. A public outcry is never heard; instead they are viewed as heroes.

Angela’s Ashes – Based on a best selling autobiography, Angela’s Ashes shows the hardships of a young boy and his family living in the Irish slums.

Hulu Recommendations – (clips found under Food Network Originals)

A Perfect Pint of Guinness – Apparently there are 6 steps to pouring a perfect Guinness.  And to think how many of us have been pouring imperfect stouts this whole time….it’s a shame.

Stout- Soaked Beef – ymmmm

If you love PlayOn, and you are a C# programmer - we may have the perfect job for you! We are currently looking for a project designer/coder to help make PlayOn even better.
 
Skills: C#/ .NET, Interop/p-invoke/COM (Win32 APIs)
 
Experience: Building robust fully-featured commerical applications; experience with Media Applications
 
General: Rock Star!
 
If interested, please contact jobs@playon.tv.
 

Many members of the PlayOn community have been asking about PlayOn's relationship with content providers, most notably Hulu. This long discussed topic has recently gained more interest due to Congressional hearings last week looking into the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal (NBCU). During those hearings, Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) asked NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, "Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs"?

Mr. Zucker's response (below) was interesting for a number of reasons, which we at PlayOn feel warrant additional clarification and comment.

"This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.", said Zucker.

First of all, Mr. Zucker's initial inclination to point the finger at Hulu all but directly contradicts Hulu's own public statement in which their CEO, Jason Kilar, said that, "Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes." At the time Hulu's statement was issued (February, 2009), NBCU was one of only two content providers who owned a significant stake in Hulu (the other being News Corp). It seems highly unlikely that the "content providers" Mr. Kilar was referring to did not include NBCU, given the significant influence NBCU is capable of exerting on Hulu as a material equity stakeholder.

Mr. Zucker's seemingly disingenuous finger-pointing at Hulu serves to underscore the awkward position NBCU finds itself in when trying to encourage Internet distribution of its content through Hulu to the PC screen (which reduces the frequency of Internet piracy), while simultaneously trying to prevent the same Internet distribution to the TV screen (which increases cannibalization of broadcast viewership). It is no secret that the economics of an “over-the-air” viewing are currently more attractive to NBCU than an "over-the-net" viewing. Admittedly, balancing these competing objectives must be a difficult exercise for NBCU. However, it would seem more productive to try to work with players like PlayOn (and Boxee) in order to improve the economics of an episode on the TV screen, instead of pursuing the short-sighted tactic of attempting to block such technologies. As one small example, Hulu could implement a model where more ads were inserted into commercial breaks when viewed on the TV screen, and technologies like PlayOn (and Boxee) could participate in such a program by identifying themselves to Hulu's system as a "TV Browser" (to facilitate this). We at PlayOn would be more than happy to collaborate with Hulu on such an approach (and have expressed this willingness to both them and NBCU in the past). I believe Boxee would be eager to do so as well.

The second point of Mr. Zucker's response which bears scrutiny is his statement that, "what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content." To understand this point, it is first necessary to understand what Boxee and PlayOn are, and what they do functionally. As many PlayOn fans have been well aware of for quite some time, PlayOn is, fundamentally, a Web browser. It is PC software which communicates with and downloads/renders content from remote Web/content servers in order to fulfill browsing requests made by a user. It uses standard Web protocols for this communication, just as popular browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome do. In fact, PlayOn is actually a customized version of the Internet Explorer engine (the current version of Boxee uses the Firefox browsing engine in a similar way). This makes technologies like PlayOn and Boxee very different (legally) from the "distributors" (aka: "websites") that Mr. Zucker refers to in his statement. PlayOn is a browsing technology. It is not a distribution platform or a video website. Neither Mozilla nor Google (nor Microsoft or other browser makers) have distribution deals with Hulu. It is misleading of Mr. Zucker to suggest that other browser makers are obligated to have distribution deals in order to enable browsing to Hulu (simply because they display content on the TV screen instead of the PC screen). Boxee's own response to the hearing makes a similar clarification.

On a more speculative note, it is important to point out that the original Boxee implementation was quite different than the current one and, at the time Hulu initially blocked Boxee, there was a much stronger legal case that Hulu could have made against Boxee than it can currently. Specifically, Boxee had setup a process by which it ran a "bot" that collected all of the Hulu metadata and then housed it on Boxee’s own server as its own feeds which were redistributed to Boxee users upon request by the Boxee software. This process was somewhat similar to the way Google (and other search engine) "bots" collect data from websites in order to include them in search results. However, there is an accepted standard (The "Robot Exclusion Standard") for website owners to "disallow" such bots collecting data from sections of their sites. Hulu had implemented such exclusions of their feeds (http://www.hulu.com/robots.txt), and Boxee's implementation at that time was violating this exclusion. I believe this gave Hulu both a technical and legal justification (and means) of blocking Boxee at that time. That has clearly changed, as Boxee has since implemented a true Browser model (as PlayOn has had from the beginning). But I suspect this initial case of probable illegality is what gives Mr. Zucker the ability to state (in the past tense) that "what Boxee was doing was illegal", even if it is no longer true. Mr. Kilar's references to Boxee took on a similar historical tone when he was recently quoted as saying, "Boxee had no right to do what it was doing."

All told, this increased scrutiny at the Congressional level will likely cause NBCU/Hulu to engage in more acceptable business practices. The importance of getting the NBCU acquisition approved is far greater than what is at stake in the battles between Hulu and companies like PlayOn and Boxee. Let's hope it ushers in a new era where we can all collaborate to make Internet viewing on the TV both enjoyable to consumers and profitable to content owners.

- Jeff Lawrence, PlayOn CEO

We've gotten lots of questions lately about support for the Wii. Yes - it is delayed (sorry!), but it is coming - and soon. We anticipate releasing it at the end of July/ early August (so - in 5 weeks or so). Why the delay? Well...we had some other priorities creep in (bugs, new device support, and the like), and we want to make sure the interface really rocks. This takes time. As you may know - we have no (very, very little) control over the interface for the PS3 or Xbox360 - so while not as pretty, from a development-perspective, this makes things a little easier. On the Wii, we have free reign over interface, and so we want to make sure it is great ... and this always takes longer than anticipated. We will keep you posted if there is another delay, but we plan to get it in your hands as soon as possible.