MeeVee, an online TV listings and search provider, recently covered here, launched a redesigned site today with several new features. The new version combines the TV listings grid and watch list functionality into a single user interface allowing users to create a personalized TV guide. They’ve also added a social networking widget that shows your guide on personal pages and blogs and they’ve integrated the “TVwithmeevee” blog, with its creepy, phallic potato mascot (of which I am a fan), into the rest of the site. While MeeVee has moved the service forward with this launch, it still doesn’t go far enough.
The experience is centered on the personalized TV guide. On MeeVee, you select from a list of favorite actors, genres, subjects…or enter keyword interests (e.g. “golf”). The guide then finds upcoming programming based on those interests. It’s a saved search so it’ll keep looking for those programs for you until you remove the interests. If you love “Jennifer Aniston”, you can add her as a favorite actress or keyword and, until you delete her, all shows or movies on TV with Jennifer Aniston showing through your cable or satellite provider will populate your guide. If you are willing to invest the time, you can build a totally customized TV guide and ditch the universal grid completely. It’s an easy-to-use application and it’s a nice model for building a personalized web experience. The TV listings widget (called “MeeVee Guide”) they’ve built shows your personal guide to visitors of your pages on other sites. You can add to a page by pasting a snippet of code to it. They need to streamline the experience, but it’s a nice feature and I expect it will gain some traction.
All in all, these are improvements. The problem, and I’ve alluded to this in previous posts, is the experience isn’t complete enough. People are watching less broadcast TV and the move to time-shifted television is gaining momentum. It’s nice to find what I could watch at 8, but maybe I don’t watch at 8. If I’m looking for a TV show, with the exception of a live event, I want to watch it when I’m ready. At the very least, I want to program my PVR to watch it whenever I want.
I’ve spoken to their CEO, Michael Raneri, and he says the ability to program and watch is in the works. Raneri says MeeVee will take the personalized guide model and apply it other forms of content besides TV listings, with user-generated and professionally produced internet video both coming soon. With the millions of pieces of video content floating around out there, there’s a role for someone to begin to filter it based on personal preferences, so why not MeeVee? When they’ve done that and I can watch more content then and there or whenever I choose, they’ll have given me the more complete experience I crave.
As soon as this controls my PVR, or, even better, as soon as their site can just record my desired content so I can watch it whenever and wherever I want without having a set-top box, I will fork over mucho dollars.
Yes, agree 100%
bandwagon me. However, that mascot will ensure that i will only use it when my wife is not around. I thought the TiVO mascot was cute and slightly annoying – MeeVee is ugly and embarassing.
TechCruch is starting to turn into TechCrap!
This is pretty cool…I agree with the above about being able to select stuff to record…that would be sweet!
A last.fm style plug-in for Windows XP Media Center Edition and Apple’s new iTV thing would be perfect for a solution like this.
It doesn’t seem to work with Firefox (at least not Firefox 2.0b2) ……..
I used to use the site but as i said i can’t access it… i don’t want to have to fall back to IE tab the whole time, does anyone have any information about this?
it doesn’t work with Safari either – it totally crashed it!
A big improvement. This is rendering my on screen guide useless. Click to watch would be sweet.
Not working properly with IE right now either. Maybe it can’t handle the TC effect.
“With the millions of pieces of video content floating around out there, there’s a role for someone to begin to filter it based on personal preferences, so why not MeeVee? ”
Good point – but it raises an issue. How can you delivery a good experience from million of undifferentiated pieces of content when the content has no good meta-data around it, and meevee hasn’t provided any contextual information about the interests and skill level of the user.
Sorting and organizing User-Generated Video is an important function – but it’s going to happen in a Social Media Community context.
I’ve been using MeeVee for several months and I’m not thrilled with the new layout. I only use 1024×768 screen res, and the new layout is too big. A lot of sites and blogs (Gawker Media, anyone?) want to cater to the widescreen users, but leave no layout-switching option for those of us with regular-width screens or lower resolutions.
If these tv guides included recording services, than they would become a Tivo on the Internet: you have a reccomendation engine to filter programs, you record them and then you can wath eventually rating. The only difference is that you can do it on the Internet.
In Italy, Fastweb (http://www.fastweb.it/) has a virtual recorder: they record programs for you. I think is an interesting concept: if you have a broadband connection, you do not need to have a hardware to record, and you can share your preferences with other people.
Ciao
Nicola
ONLINE TV IS THE FUTURE. WE HAVE ONLY SCRAPED THE SURFACE OF THIS TECHNOLGY.
Ok, why would I go on the internet first to check TV listings if I can just check the full listings with my Digital Cable menu. Unless you are using your internet on your TV, this makes no sense. With DC, if I see something I like, I click on it, and watch it. How does that work with this site? These things are supposed to make life easier, no?
On the flipside, meevee obviously makes perfect sense for online TV. That’s where it should focus.
I use Orb, they use meevee for their TV guide and it has the PVR and remote streaming of live and recorded TV features, you should check it out: http://www.orb.com
I agree with Michael. As someone who was ‘brought back to watching TV” when I installed Tivo 4 years ago…..I want to *LOVE* MeeVee. However, it’s an extra step in the process that I don’t want. Someone give me an interface, please, to MeeVee’s rich site, and an activation of my DVR. I’m not interested in sitting here with my laptop, looking at MeeVee, and then translating that over to my Tivo. When does the integration happen?
And even worse, Kat, is trying to view many of these screens in 768X1024 (Tablet PC in portrait mode). Usually I end up scrolling horizontally to see the middle (where the real content is); unfortunately (or maybe fortunately? [grin]), all the adverts and navigation are off-screen on the left and right.
As far as I can tell they’ve made the site pretty useless! If you look through the listing grid and find a show… a single episode of a show… that you wish to watch you now need to set that show as an “interest” in order to get it to show up on the “My Guide (Watchlist)” panel. The problem is that you are no longer asked how often you wish this show added to the watchlist (New episodes only, anytime that it is on, just this episode). The result is that a synidcated show like “The Simpsons” could show up 100 times in a week with all the reruns that show up on numerous channels thoughout the week. Once the show is marked as an interest you can then go in a selection of “New episodes only” or “All Episodes”… still not allowing you to add a single episode of a show into the watchlist. They appear to have lost sight of the most basic feature of the website.