It has been a wild winter for PlayOn, and an even wilder one for me personally. I delivered our 2nd daughter in November - 3 and 1/2 months early at only 2lbs. She remained in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for 100 long days. You can learn a little more about my daughter Amelia (and the rest of my family)by watching a local newscast on our situation:

Before "Millie" was born, I knew little about the March of Dimes. They provided valuable assistance to us, including organizing the Thanksgiving dinner shown in the news story. Importantly, they fund research to prevent prematurity and help babies born too early or sick.

The MediaMall/PlayOn team has been super supportive of me and my family. I am grateful that I work with such a kind, caring, and progressive group of folks.

I'd love to have your support as well as we help raise money for the March for Babies -- to ensure every baby has a healthy start.

Thanks for your support!

Thanks to the 1,700 of you who took the time to respond to our Beta survey in January. We wanted to share some of what we learned with you…
 
90% of you think it works pretty well or great (thanks for your patience and understanding during our outages). You seem to like Hulu (42%) and Netflix (33%) the best, and you hate that the trick play features don’t work well (ff and rew) and that you get data corrupt or other errors. We hate that too! We are working on ways to make PlayOn more reliable. This one surprised us – 46% of you use PlayOn every day (once or more) and 46% use it once or twice a week. Your couches are back in use – wooohooo.
 
The top 5 product feature requests:
1 – Media Sharing from the PC (yes, we are working on it – it should be out by the end of the summer!)
2 – Customized RSS feeds (we just launched a plugin API – so have at it)
3 – Mac and Linux support (don’t hold your breath)
4 – Wii support (coming next month!)
 
Top 5 content provider requests:
1 – ABC (coming….)
2 – Discovery
3 – Comedy Central
4 – History Channel
5 - Pandora
 
And – finally, 57% of you had already purchased at the time of the survey, 15% planned to, and 25% were on the fence.
 
So – thanks for the GREAT feedback. We are working on YOUR top priorities now, and plan to launch our Q2 survey this month…so keep the feedback coming.

We are excited to let you know that you can now access more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes available to rent or buy instantly from Amazon Video On Demand. And, you can now access original entertainment and content from Revision 3, a TV network for the Web. The latest PlayOn release adds support for both services.

With support for Amazon Video on Demand, Revision 3, Hulu, CBS.com, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube, ESPN.com, CNN.com, we hope that PlayOn will become the most robust browser enabling you to watch Internet video content on your TV.

The latest release is available for download at http://www.themediamall.com/playon/download (2.59.3352). We aren't pushing an auto-update yet, so if you want to check it out, you will have to download and install it from the www.getplayon.com website.

This release was based in large part on requests from our user base for more content...and it won't end there, we are still working on adding support for more Internet video content.

Both CrunchGear and Audioholics wrote about the new release today...so feel free to check out the articles and add your .02 on PlayOn. As always - we love to know what you think!

Hey PlayOn users! Most of you should be on the latest version (2.59.3330), and if you're not, head over to www.getplayon.com and download the most recent installer. We've ironed out some troubling issues that showed up in the previous versions, and got our website up and running again. And on Sunday evening, we increased the price of PlayOn to its regular fee of $39.99.

If you missed out on the $10 promotional rebate, well, sorry! On the bright side, we still think our software is well worth the price. And we've got lots of FREE new features lined up for the spring. Wii support is still clipping along nicely, and new content providers and local file sharing (albeit in a limited form to begin with) are just around the corner as well. Everyone will get this stuff as free upgrades to their existing PlayOn installations.

We also highly recommend that you sign up for our PlayOn newsletter, as we will let you know about special promotions and news about PlayOn. It's a great way to stay informed. And we won't spam you with pestering notices.

Two steps forward, one step back. This weekend, we got slammed with two major problems:

• Videos from Hulu are unable to play unless you (temporarily) change your video performance setting to "Low". We'll have a workaround for this soon (days, not weeks, don't worry).
• Our website went into complete meltdown mode.

Always fun to try to fix these things over the weekend, but we're doing our best. We set up a temporary homepage with limited info about PlayOn, and links to the download and purchase. The PlayOn software itself should still be working just fine, since it runs independently of our web servers.

We hope to restore website service as quickly as possible. We know that without the forum and FAQ it's a bit frustrating to get help. Remember that you can always send a support request through PlayOn Settings (this should be working still), or otherwise mail us directly.

Most likely, we will extend the price change until next weekend, since the site has been out of operation for more than 24 hours now, and it crashed just before we scheduled to increase the license fee. Stay tuned for more info.

We at MediaMall are happy and proud to announce that the first production version of PlayOn has been released! The beta program is officially over. We have said it many times before, but we want to thank all our beta testers for their relentless testing, constructive feedback, and considerate patience.

As before, PlayOn can be downloaded at www.getplayon.com. We've reset the trial period again to a fresh 14 days, as promised. And the price is still only $29.99 -- for one more week only. If you've already bought a license, you're all set. If you upgrade PlayOn to the latest version (2.59.3318), your license key will still be valid.

We expect to be releasing new updates and patches over the coming weeks and months. Our developers have been hard at work on adding Wii support, and making lots of great improvements across the board with PlayOn's base functionality. The best of all is that all these updates will be absolutely free for all our users.

Enjoy!

Yesterday, our developers posted version 2.59.3302 (RC6). It is essentially the same as RC5, but we've reset the trial period to a fresh 14 days. This means all of you who were reluctant to purchase over the past few months, due to bugs or just not being convinced, get a chance to try things out again.

For those of you who have already purchased, you do not need to purchase again - the trial is for folks who didn't have a chance to try it out enough to make the purchase decision. Of course, everyone should download the latest version (it knows if you have already purchased a license, and you won't need to buy another one!)

We plan on posting the production version around the beginning of February. There will be some additional bug fixes and a few streamlining features, but no big core functionality changes. And we'll reset the trial again then, to yet another 14 days. Which gives many of you a chance to try out PlayOn free for an entire month.

One last note: the price for PlayOn will be increasing from $29.99 to $39.99 once we release the production version. We are keeping it at $29.99 through the month of January as a thank you to our early adopters, for sticking with us during the beta process. Please note - if you have already bought a license or if you buy one at $29.99, you will NOT need to buy another one once the product release is out, or once the price goes up to $39.99. You will automatically get the production version at no additional cost.

We have also posted a survey www.themediamall.com/playonsurvey which we'd love for you to fill out if you have tried PlayOn. This will help us prioritize future development.

Thanks again for your support!

All of us at MediaMall just want to say Happy Holidays to everyone, and once again send our big thanks to everyone who has stuck with us for so long. We're very excited about 2009. There are a ton of great features and plans on our horizon.

Our developers are working hard on adding support for Wii consoles now, as well as plans to better integrate with additional devices. And the core product will continue to improve, both in stability, usability, and cool features. Be on the lookout for the addition of new content providers, local file sharing -- and much more -- over the coming months.

We just released and posted Release Candidate 4 at the download site. Make sure you give it a spin if you haven't already! www.getplayon.com. We expect to push our first real production release in just a couple of weeks, if not sooner.

We wish everyone a great holiday season, and look forward to what's in store for 2009!

It's that time of year, and we at MediaMall want to give thanks to YOU: our fantastic user community! You guys have all been rock stars during the beta testing months in August, September, October, and up til now. Without your help, PlayOn wouldn't be nearly where we are today. So, thank you!

We also want to thank Joel Durham Jr. for posting "A Tech Geek's Thank You List" at ExtremeTech, for having added PlayOn to his thank you list. We're glad you are thankful, Joel. So are we.

We recently published a new version of PlayOn (2.58.3248) that is our first official release candidate. The trial period was reset to a fresh 14 days, and there are a few improvements here and there. You can read the release notes here, and as always, you can sign up to download at www.getplayon.com. We expect to have the production release ready in a few weeks.

But PlayOn doesn't end there -- not by a long shot. We have tons of features lined up for the end of the year and well into 2009 -- all free for licensed installations. Some of the big items are: support for Netflix Silverlight accounts, support for Nintendo Wii, more content providers, performance improvements, and lots more.

Pass the gravy. Gobble, gobble.

As part of our efforts to get the word out about PlayOn, we have just launched a new Facebook page. We are trying to build up a community in advance of our launch so that we can hit the ground running and start getting the word out about PlayOn. We'd love your help! Check out the page, become a fan, post a video. In fact, we are offering a free license key ($30 value) for the person who posts the most creative video showing how COOL PlayOn is. And - of course, everyone is entitled to a free 14 day trial....

So - check it out - share your thoughts and feedback - and let us know why YOU think PlayOn is cool (or not....)