Veoh TV: First Look
June 22, 2007 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers
Yesterday, I said Veoh TV would be the first application to successfully combine the infinite choice of online video with the intuitive ease of TV. I’m watching Ask a Ninja on Veoh TV Beta right now, and I’m happy to report that I like what I see so far.
Video browsing is dead simple — it actually has to prompt you to use the keyboard for search. The personalized widget tabs powered by yourminis will satisfy any information overload junkie, with widgets autoconfigured to match what you’re watching. My Veoh TV Flickr widget, for instance, often looks up anime photos.
Veoh TV is an online video Swiss Army Knife: aside from being a video browser, it’s also a video podcatcher, torrent client, local FLV player, and streaming video downloader (all DRM-free!). Streaming video sites shouldn’t worry about losing onsite ad revenue; Veoh links back to video pages, even when playing local copies.
Veoh TV’s video search, powered by Yahoo, leaves a lot to be desired — it’s slower than its browser counterpart, and I couldn’t search for videos on YouTube — but that’s mostly a problem with Yahoo Video Search itself. Veoh TV has the potential to show every video on the Web; they’ll just have to find a better search partner (Scoble would probably recommend ClipBlast).
Fullscreen streaming video playback is smooth — but until Veoh TV has an audio graphic equalizer, Winamp will still remain my player of choice for long local videos. Of course, if I’m too lazy to open Winamp, I’m flipping through videos in Veoh TV. Yes, you can actually channel-surf across the video Web using Veoh TV’s recommendation engine.
Veoh TV Beta comes in a full standalone installer, but it cleanly upgrades your existing Veoh client while preserving your local Veoh library. Go get your instant beta invitation here (Windows only), and see for yourself another nail in TV’s coffin. Warning: Veoh TV could turn you into a channel-surfing mouse potato.
While I am delighted to see the continued unification of contextual serach video and personalization, the general branding and interface do not present the level of advanced capabilities Veoh’s technology can serve up. It also appears that it is targeted to a certain dempgraphic that may not have a historic understanding of what is possible and therefore has set the bar lower than what this consortium is capable of in cross platform user experience and search logic. AOL TW, Dillar and Eisner are a terrific powerhouse of media geniuses , but for such a group of multi-channel media gurus one would think there would be more innovation to serve up a richer and more personalized interface.
these guys must suck because its not for yet and i mean they been saying its coming out for what i here more then two years i know it been more then 6 months thats how long i’ve had my mac and had veah tv on a pc but why would they tease f ing dicks
lost my original veoh format through a glitch not sure if I like the new setup