Web Video on Television From the Founders of TiVo

March 2, 2014 Leave a comment

Web Video on Television From the Founders of TiVo

How much does Qplay advance the practice of streaming video on TV?

GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Feb. 25, 2014 6:54 p.m. ET

The lives of couch potatoes changed forever when co-founders Mike Ramsay and James Barton rolled out TiVo 15 years ago. Now the folks behind the original digital video recorder want to reinvent how we watch streaming Internet video on a television.

Their new product, Qplay, is a $49 add-on TV box and cloud service that turns an iPad into a smart remote for watching streaming video on TV.

The state of Internet video is getting to be like cable TV before TiVo, says Mr. Ramsay, Qplay’s CEO: “There’s so much TV and nothing to watch.”

An excess of streaming “channels”—YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, HBO Go—all vie for our attention.

So Qplay replaces isolated channels with personalized playlists, dubbed Qs, drawn from across the Internet. They’re based on your chosen topics and content sources, videos selected by Qplay staff, and what your friends are sharing on Qplay.

I got early access to Qplay, now available to a limited audience online.

Qplay has some good features that make Internet video easier to watch on a TV. As soon as you launch the iPad app, Internet video starts streaming to your TV, and you can pause or fast forward it like a live show.

You control everything with the iPad, but the TV box is connected directly to the Internet, so if you switch to another app, Qplay keeps playing.

One of the most compelling ideas is that Qplay can make a Q of out of what your friends are sharing on Facebook FB -1.31% and Twitter. TWTR -1.47% You can also subscribe to Qs from other users—in short, letting people whose taste you trust choose programming for you.

I loved the concept of Qplay—but it has some difficult hurdles to clear before it earns a coveted place on my TV shelf.

Qplay’s biggest challenge is that it can’t yet stream a lot of the stuff I actually want to watch. Today, Qplay pulls in content from sites including YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook, but doesn’t incorporate premium services like Netflix NFLX +1.35% and Hulu.

The question remains: Will the big streaming media companies play ball? If Qplay can sign them up, the little red box could lead to big things.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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