Brad Greenspan’s Live Universe continues its acquisitions spree: they’ve bought troubled Silicon Valley startup MeeVee, we’re heard from multiple sources. This comes less than a month after they announced the acquisition of Pageflakes, another northern California startup.

We do not know the acquisition price, but it is undoubtedly less than the $25 million Meevee has raised in venture capital over the years. The company, which was founded in 2000, let 20% of its staff go in mid-2007, and made more layoffs earlier this year.

Meevee integrates online TV listings with video. In 2006 we compared them favorably to other online tv guides, and the product has evolved significantly since then. Still, they never got the traction they needed for a big liquidity event. Perhaps Meevee will find a comfortable home at Live Universe, which has, among many other properties, a popular online video site called LiveVideo.

The MeeVee team will report to Dan Cohen, the former CEO of Pageflakes, according to our sources.

BuddyTV, home to one of the web’s largest television-oriented communities, has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Madrona Venture Group. This round brings BuddyTV’s total funding to over $9 million.

BuddyTV aims to provide a comprehensive resource and community for television fans, serving up daily editorials, interviews, and discussions. Other features include a “Television Jockey” service, which allows users to stream video and audio live to other members as they share their thoughts on the latest TV events.

In June 2007 BuddyTV raised $2.8 million in a round led by Gemstar-TV Guide. Competitors to BuddyTV include MeeVee, which was recently placed on Deadpool watch.

We should note that previous rumors of BuddyTV’s acquisition by Comcast have proven to be false.

TV listings discovery service MeeVee has put itself on the market via press release.

The Burlingame based company has taken $25 million in funding over four rounds that included DEFTA Partners, Edmond de Rothschild Venture Capital, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, The Bay Area Equity Fund and WaldenVC. The first sign of trouble at MeeVee surfaced in July 2007 when the company cut 20% of its workforce.

According to MeeVee:

Due to accelerated development of the online entertainment market, the Board of Directors at MeeVee has determined that combining with an established player will maximize the potential for the community, technology and content relationships the Company has built.

MeeVee claims that it is “engaged in multiple discussions with potential acquirers that provide the greatest long term upside and synergy,” but then adds “Interested parties should contact Steve Hughey (shughey@meevee.com) for more information.” You don’t normally ask for interested parties to contact a company re a sale unless the current talks (if they exist) aren’t going well.

The other sign of trouble and that they’ve just about run out of money: the press release states that MeeVee has 7 full time employees. After the July cut there were 27 employees.

We’re putting MeeVee on Deadpool watch.

In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN, and Comcast’s Fancast in gaining access to Viacom’s video library.

Viacom obviously wants to strengthen the hand of other video Websites against Youtube by spreading its videos everywhere except on YouTube. Viacom has a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement and yanked its videos from the site last year. As Comedy Central’s own Jon Stewart said last night regarding his parent company’s lawsuit against YouTube, “A billion dollars? What are they four-year olds?”

I’ve embedded the clip below (which is mostly about the Hollywood writer’s strike) from The Daily Show’s Website. The comment is about four minutes in:

TV listings discovery service MeeVee has taken $3.5 Million Series D in a round that included original backers Bay Area Equity Fund, Defta Partners, FCPR Israel Discovery Fund, Labrador Ventures, Rothschild Ventures and WaldenVC.

The investment takes MeeVee’s total funding to $18 million.

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. The company also provides a widget that can be placed off-site to display what you’re watching on television.

Burlingame based MeeVee reduced staff numbers by 20% in July.

(via PE Hub)

Silicon Valley based online TV startup MeeVee has laid off approximately 20% of its staff, including three executives. The cuts were primarily in finance, sales and marketing, and 27 employees remain with the company.

MeeVeee is an online TV guide that recently began to integrate video content directly into the site. They’ve raised $14.5 million in two rounds of venture capital.

CEO Michael Ranieri said this evening that the company is focusing on moving the product forward for now and is in the process of raising another round of financing. He also points to recent deals with Gemstar and CBS as signs of forward momentum for the company.

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.

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.

Silicon Valley based Meevee has raised an additional round of financing of at least $8 million, a source close to the company told us today. The lead investor is the JP Morgan affiliated fund, Bay Area Equity Fund. No word on valuation or if the fund’s previous investors also participated.

Meevee is an interactive television guide with some original content directly linked. See our post Overview: The End of Paper TV Guides for a quick summary of their business and how they compare to competitors.

The size of the round is notable given the relatively sparse capital needs of a startup like Meevee. This tells me they may be looking to use some of the cash, or their newly valued stock, in an upcoming acquisition spree. As noted in our post above, there are a lot of competitors in this space, and it needs to be consolidated. In my opinion, a merger with MobiTV, discussed in this post, would be an ideal combination of content and guide.

Want to work at Meevee? Check out their CrunchBoard job listing. Previous TechCrunch posts discussing Meevee are here.

A few years ago, online TV guides were just a paperless version of what was arriving in the mail or the middle of Sunday papers. Today, however, as we get closer to the world of TV over IP and video on demand in every home, the space is evolving, giving customers more than they can get in paper.

At the same time, advertisers are realizing that TV guides with demographically targeted content present a promising vehicle for delivering targeted ads. Market penetration for these sites is still relatively modest, but it is growing and, as the prospect of not just finding television programming, but also watching it online, becomes more likely, usage will grow exponentially.

Just as very few people bother to check the newspaper for movie times at their local theatre, preferring to go online instead, fewer and fewer people rely on the old print version of television listing times. There are just too many benefits to going online. We explain why below.

As of today, all sites with guides are free and it appears they will remain so, hoping their targeted content will attract more users and thereby enough advertisers or affiliate sales (think iTunes-like content downloads) to build sustainable businesses.

The best features on these sites are those that are moving beyond listings and doing a good job of matching viewer’s interests and habits with programming content. If it sounds akin to online dating sites, well… it is. Your potential matches, in this case, are TV programs.

The big win, however, is to link these listings directly to TV over IP content, something that will require industry-level psychological and legal evolution.

The companies listed here are the major providers of TV programming schedules online across local, cable, and satellite. MeeVee, Zap2It, and TitanTV also syndicate, making guides available across a number of sites. Individual cable or satellite providers and sites that provide listings in conjunction with hardware/software solutions, like SnapStream, will not be reviewed in this post.

Read More

As a follow up to our previous post on TV network activity on the Internet and through iTunes, we’ve further explored television programming and how it’s playing out on the web beyond the major networks.

I will steer clear of yahoo, google, youtube… all the sites that have been covered extensively on this site. Instead, I want to highlight a few of the less covered services.

It’s hard to draw a line between the sites I just mentioned and those I’ll discuss below, as they share many features (and many use Flash as the underlying technology). One difference is the sites above don’t make programming decisions for users. The sites below do offer some form of programming – there are decisions made by someone about what to present on these sites and when to present it. There’s room for both approaches online and while most eyes and venture dollars are flowing to video portals right now, I believe we’ll eventually see a similar interest from the startup community in programming.

I’m Too Old For This!!!

Not surprisingly, much online programming, like MTV Overdrive, caters to an under-25 crowd, but there’s a selection of good stuff for the rest of us: BloombergTV and MLB.tv, for example, offer relevant content and strong channel-like experiences online.

In the youth market, the influence of MTV is unmistakable. ManiaTV, Fuse.tv, MusicplusTV, and CurrentTV, while each certainly different in its own right, believe that some combination of music, reality, edginess, and/or political and social awareness, are the keys to success.

ManiaTv

So this is what happened to Tom Green? Maybe I’m not too old for this, because I like ManiaTv. Check out Freak Show! There’s enough good stuff to watch on here that I’m actually surprised it doesn’t have a bigger audience, particularly given the explosion in video sites in the last 6 months. I think there’s room for this kind of programming and while the Alexa numbers don’t suggest a flop, it’s certainly not booming. Whether or not their audience is sufficient for profitability, I don’t know. At least they don’t have to worry about huge production costs.

CurrentTV

Best known as the Al Gore vehicle, Current is for those a bit more politically minded and socially active. There’s a good lineup of original programming, there appears to be pretty strong community participation, and I find it to be a nice usable site, but it hasn’t taken off. Perhaps the Al Gore movie will provide it a shot in the arm, but as of yet it’s showing no signs of relinquishing its bear hug on its negligible traffic rankings. Will it heat up during the next presidential election? Who knows? I’d have already bet it would have had its day with the many significant polarizing issues in American politics. Perhaps its greatest problem is its more intellectual leanings. It’s not hard to get your friends to watch a horny donkey video, but try getting the same group to watch a video on teaching abstinence in schools.

iBlueTV

Another interesting programming concept with a bit of a different twist is iBlue. IBlue streams several different channels from their site. It seems to range from motorcross to sci-fi to independent filmmaking. There’s some decent time-killing content here. At the very least, I can see it finding an audience with the same college students that like laser shows.

I’m NOT Too Old For This!!!

Classic television programming and old movies (which have been non-primetime TV fodder for years) have also found a home on the web. Recent deals, like Guba’s with Warner, will give added life to the retro movement. Today, AOL leads the pack with In2TV. You can watch 42 “classic” programs from Batman cartoons to Eight Is Enough (it was enough then). Programs can be either streamed in relatively low quality or you can have content pushed to you in a higher resolution format (Hi-Q), which allows a full screen view. With some of the older shows’ bad lighting, the Hi-Q format is necessary. I watched an episode of “Spencer For Hire” through the regular stream and couldn’t tell Spencer from the bad guys when night fell.

Along the same lines, if you have a soft spot for guerillas, you might want to check out Retrovision.tv and AmericafreeTV (and there are others), which offer old television programs and movies. Remember, you get what you get here – hobbyist sites that rely on advertising dollars – so don’t expect perfection.

Aggregators

There are also sites aggregating content and are starting to resemble traditional cable channels. While there are many free sites like MeeVee that direct you to free streams, sites like MobiTV, VDC (Windows only) or JumpTv are offer a hub through which to view many channels through subscription:

VDC

VDC basically takes the cable model and moves it to the internet (and combines it with the worst logo ever). The sound and picture quality are pretty good and it’s easy-to-use. But at 11.95/month, the channel lineup isn’t there yet. Its 20 or so channels are mostly a mix of news and shopping, although they did recently add TLC, Discover, and Animal Planet (all for mobile only right now). They make note of their interest in improving the lineup on the site, so I’m sure more is in the works. While that will increase their chance of success, I believe the bigger issue with VDC is in the model of porting cable to the web. I’ll ask you: Is there any real advantage to a second cable TV subscription, when there are options like Slingbox and Orb that can give you your home cable lineup on your computer or mobile phone? I’d love cheaper cable and I don’t mind getting it over the web, but without an equivalent lineup to my TV, I’m not adding or switching.

JumpTV

JumpTV aggregates hundreds of channels from around the globe. At 9.95/month per channel, it could get expensive, so Jump offers packages, like an Arab language package of 20 channels for 22.95/month. I suspect this particular niche will prove profitable for Jump in the long-term. Thought it’s not the sexiest television offer over the web, it clearly fills a need for consumers, with so many people living outside their birth country these days. While currently ranking around 13,000 in Alexa’s traffic rankings, its steady traffic uptrend suggests some demand is there. The World Cup will probably further increase it’s reach.

MobiTV

MobiTV may eventually have the most compelling offering in the space. They offer 50 channel, cable-like television subscriptions for mobile cellular devices and, more recently, for any device accessing AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots. If and when their service can be accessed over the web from any ISP, the need to continue a traditional cable or satellite television subscription comes seriously into question.

Summary

The great content revolution the Internet has wrought is seen in exactly the kind of sites I said I wasn’t going to talk about earlier, like Youtube. Anyone can now inexpensively upload, share and potentially alter content in minutes. As a result, we amateurs are producing and watching video content on a scale we’d never imagined a few years ago. At least 100,000 videos are uploaded daily on sites like YouTube, and this is increasing at a rapid rate.

But this does not mean that television programming as we know it is about to disappear. In fact, I’d argue that the overall quality of programming is higher now than it was a few years ago, perhaps because of the competition for mind share from the web. And some television producers are reaping enough benefits from the web between broadcasts (e.g. Lost) that I believe the next phase will mean altered programmed content, as TV continues its migration from passive to some level of interactivity. It’s already commonplace in TV advertising, so how long before it’s commonplace in programming? Check out “In Men We Trust”. If it will work as advertised, then we’ll watch the show while watching a show within it, and we’ll determine the arc of the story. That’s programmed content adapting to its medium. Interactivity and social networking – two things the web does well — will drive it.

Downloadable television, first made popular by Tivo and its competitors, is compelling stuff. As consumers become accustomed to watching a show whenever they choose, pausing at will and fast tracking through commercials, tuning in to a station at a scheduled broadcast time seems quaint at best. Today, 7% of U.S. households have a digital video recorder, or DVR and most cable companies offer a DVR as an option.

File trading networks, such as bittorent, are also extremely popular (if sometimes illegal) choices for consumers wanting access to time-shifted television content.

While DVRs are great, content producers and distributors are less than thrilled by the loss in revenue from all those skipped commercials. Also, DVR’d shows cannot be easily transferred to mobile devices or otherwise viewed away from their home television. Some consumers want more flexibility and options.

Enter downloadable television, spearheaded by iTunes.

On October 12 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0 which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes initially offered a selection of several thousand music videos and five TV shows, including most notably ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives, as well as the collection from past seasons. New shows are available 24 hours after the initial broadcast. Since that time, the collection has expanded with NBC Universal, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel shows, and Viacom, in addition to further Disney-owned networks’ shows. iTunes also gives the ability to view Apple’s large collection of movie trailers. Format for purchased Videos is 128 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video.

By January 2006, iTunes offered over 40 television shows for download, including, most recently, additions from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV with episodes of such shows as the Daily Show, Spongebob Squarepants, South Park, and Punk’d. Showtime added some content in February.

The networks, though, are hoping that iTunes will not be the only way people watch TV on their computers. CBS, Fox and ABC are all experimenting with their own direct downloads or streaming.

ABC

ABC is offering streaming versions of a number of its hit shows to viewers within the U.S. for no charge: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. The shows are viewable in 400×700 Flash format. On the plus side, ABC’s offering is browser and platform agnostic, and are free. On the minus side, and these are big ones, you must be online to view the show. You can’t take these with you on a laptop or other device and watch them while on a plane, or otherwise offline. Also, There are a number of short commercials that cannot be skipped. So in the end, ABC is offering a nice way for me to watch time-shifted shows on my PC-enabled living room television, but not much else. See Mike Davidson for more on this.

CBS

CBS is going with downloads, through their CBS On Demand project. Only a single show is currently offered – Survivor – and you must be in the U.S. to use the service. Quality is 640×480 pixels. Shows cost $.99 and must be watched within 24 hours of downloading (again, not a very good option for travelers). You must have a Windows PC to view the shows. They cannot be burned to dvd. Frankly, with all of these limitations I’m surprised they even let you watch the show, period. It’s like they’re begging to fail so that they can say “hey, see, we tried, people don’t want this.” Note that CBS is also experimenting with shows on Google Video.

NBC

NBC is offering a number of shows through iTunes, but has no direct to consumer offering. They offer thirteen shows on iTunes, including The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live, The Apprentice, Law and Order, Scrubs and The Office, as well as a number of vintage shows.

FOX

Fox is shaking things up a bit. In April they announced a six year deal with their affiliates to allow them to show back catalog shows on the internet. They are also starting to roll out downloads of the show “24″ through their Myspace property, but I am unable to find much information on it yet.

SUMMARY

It’s going to be a while before the service models are compelling enough for the world to turn away en masse from today’s TV, but it’s clear we’re at the start of a major disruption that will shake content producers (the networks) and the distributors (cable) to the core.

Nothing is close to challenging iTunes yet for downloadable tv dominance (well, except bittorent and DVRs), and it’s unlikely a single network will be able to do much to overcome them. People want to be able to consume their content in one place, and iTunes does a very good job of allowing that. It’s simple, has some flexibility with regard to moving to a device and the shows do not “expire”. The real competition to iTunes is still to come: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, among others, will have product offering in this space sooner or later. (Note: AOL is already streaming a number of vintage television shows to users).

Business models need to change. Content producers cannot rely on network deals, 30 second advertising and, later, dvd sales, to pull in the revenue. Shows will have to stand on their own, and will probably need to be free for the first few episodes to pull in viewers who may eventually be willing to pay. Frankly, I look forward to the day that a show, ignored by the networks, first decides to launch itself on iTunes and go straight to consumers. The press around it would be overwhelming. The first to do it will have a big advantage.

There is a market for third party service providers, too. Services like Meevee are starting to bridge the gap between providing online television listing information and allowing people to actually view the content on their computers. Cozmo.tv and Brightcove are allowing people to control their Tivo’s through their browser. And how long will it be before MobiTV, which currently streams television to mobile devices, is able contractually to simply flip a switch and offer streaming television direct to a PC? They are already making moves in that direction, and Orb offers a similar, free service.

Note: This article was written with my friend Neil Kjeldsen, a new blogger but longtime writer, and someone who knows the television and film space well. Look for more posts by Neil here on TechCrunch.