(The picture makes sense once you read to the end). A former MeeVee employee emails in to say that he hasn’t received his 2008 tax forms from the company, and that no one will pick up the phone to say when he might receive them. We emailed Brad Greenspan, the CEO of parent company LiveUniverse (MeeVee was acquired in May 2008) for a comment. His response: “LiveUniverse is in business” (not what we asked, but good to know), and “…we haven’t had any meevee employees active in a few months as we consolidate operations of that website with a few others.”
We speculated on the health of the parent company last month after a number of high profile outages and claims by employees and business partners that they were going unpaid, but Greenspan insists LiveUniverse remains a going concern. → Read More
There’s currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse’s services for the past couple of days. We’ve been getting tips about this since last Thursday, and tried contacting founder & CEO Brad Greenspan (also the founder of MySpace) for an explanation to no avail.
Pingdom caught the fact that the light has gone out for the websites Revver (which we’ve declared dead or at least struggling for life before), LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes, but missed other unreachable properties such as Peerflix. The only websites that seem to be holding up for the time being are LiveVideo, Yikers, Glumbert and MeeVee, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for those to stay online for much longer either.
Update: per comment below, PageFlakes is back, may I suggest you back up your data if you’re an active user?
Update 2: Revver’s back too, with a message saying that they’ll be down 5PM PST January 28 but they’ll be back up in the evening. We now know that didn’t happen. → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information LiveUniverse MeeVee Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information BuddyTV MeeVee Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information MeeVee Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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: http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml CrunchBase Information DailyMotion Veoh Imeem MeeVee Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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) → Read More
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. → Read More
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 → Read More
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 → Read More
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. → Read More
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 → Read More
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 → Read More
