MeeVee Integrates Online Video With TV Listings

In a substantial upgrade this morning, the TV listing discovery service MeeVee has integrated a number of online media types along with its broadcast TV listings, including viral videos.  It’s a good move that will make the company all the more relevant in a world that is increasingly blurring the line between traditional and online media.

MeeVee’s basic service allows users to input their favorite actors, genres and keywords to be cross referenced with their local TV providers listings for a personalized viewing schedule.  Though this is fun to use, as Michael Arrington pointed out it’s relevance is somewhat mitigated by the widespread move towards time shifted TV viewing.  The company also provides a widget that can be placed off-site to display what you’re watching on television - though I personally couldn’t care less how your personal interests intersect with your local TV listings.

Note that the company’s site is not Mac friendly - it crashes Safari every time I open the front page and requires a WMV viewer to watch the TV it offers.

Today’s addition of online video from a number of sites functions like a splicing of search feeds run along side your MeeVee TV recommendations.  That’s smart.  I don’t know why more companies aren’t using online video search feeds to facilitate personalized discovery.  

MeeVee’s blog is one of the most prolific of any vendor blog I watch; the company writes every day about TV news.  That’s built a strong brand awareness throughout the blogosphere. Today the company added a “blog central” section to the site, where hand picked posts from various entertainment blogs around the web can be found.  They are presented nicely.  In most cases, the company told me, those posts are used in a content exchange though I’m guessing that some other compensation may occur at times.  If that content proves wildly compelling to users I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a more serious part of what the company does.  The blog central section of the site is, at launch at least, not positioned very prominently on the site however.

MeeVee was rumored to have raised approximately $8 million in funding last August.  If MeeVee could build some sort of tie in with PVRs and could send these recommended online videos to your TV set, I think its prospects could be greatly improved.  I’m sure they are thinking the same thing.

For now, MeeVee does well in the “wow” department and could be useful for some people.  It’s moving in a good direction and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become an important player in this space if it can pull of a couple more big moves.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.