All Good Things…
July 14th, 2008Unfortunately must come to an end..
When we launched nearly a year ago we had grand plans for PlayTeeVee. Thousands of people playing at once with (multiplayer) board games, action games, interactive stories, you name it. The plan was to entice as many TiVo users as possible with free games and thereby gain a large user base. Once we would have a sufficent number of people we could approach advertisers and offer them TV Advertising at a great price.
That didn’t happen..
Why? Well.. A number of factors really. Getting the word out to users proved to be a lot more difficult than initially anticipated. Even though there are a lot of people on TiVoCommunity and other forums, it’s easy to get lost in sea of posts. Secondly, there are a number of steps users need to go through to in order to start playing. Had it shown up automatically ( like SameGame ) it would have been a lot easier for people to have a go and know about it. Last but not least, and I don’t blame TiVo for this one bit, is that 3rd party support for HME is virtually non-existent. Understandably, it’s much more lucrative for them to get Amazon UnBox or Rhapsody up and running and make money. We had some brief discussions after we launched but nothing concrete ever came of it..
Anyway, so there it is… In a couple of weeks our server contract will be up for renewal. As much as we’d like to renew it, the reality is that we can’t keep putting time and money into it unless we get something back. So unless we get a major windfall or can make something happen with TiVo, it’ll be lights out..
It’s been fun..
-T