PlayOn Premium is coming! We will release PlayOn Premium on July 15th, 2010. It will include: Comedy Central (including South Park), NHL, TV.com, MTV.com, VH1.com, and more. It will be sold as an annual subscription -- $39.99 for the first year and $19.99/year thereafter. Your subscription will entitle you to all new content services over the course of the year (and we plan to release a lot), as well as functionality improvements (including a greatly enhanced and integrated Plugin experience, Gold version of the Wii, and much more). We will also be releasing iPhone support for PlayOn Premium which may carry a small additional fee.

Starting on May 20, 2010, we will no longer sell PlayOn as a lifetime license for a single fee. We will start selling PlayOn as a subscription ($39.99 for the first year and $19.99/year thereafter) on May 20, 2010. Customers who purchase PlayOn on or after May 20,2010 will automatically receive PlayOn Premium upon its launch on July 15th, 2010.

We will continue to honor the lifetime licenses for those that purchased PlayOn prior to May 20, 2010 (which we are now calling PlayOn Basic). Your PlayOn Basic will continue to work with the existing non-beta content (Hulu, Netflix, CBS.com, ESPN.com, CNN.com, YouTube, MyMedia and Plugins) as well as Amazon VOD, MLB.tv, and Pandora. After July 15th, 2010, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report will no longer be supported in PlayOn Basic as these are being launched out of beta as part of the full Comedy Central integration in PlayOn Premium. PlayOn Base will continue to receive new features and development support, but no new content will be added into the core (though you can always add more plugins).

To thank our loyal customers, if you purchased PlayOn prior to May 20, 2010, we will be offering a founding member discount for PlayOn Premium. You may upgrade to PlayOn Premium for only $4.99 for the first year ($19.99/year thereafter). Once you purchase the upgrade, you will receive a new license key which will unlock the new PlayOn Premium content. You may also cancel your subscription at any time, and go back to PlayOn Basic (be sure to save your original license key). We are sure you will enjoy the new content and features so much, you will never want to go back.

Between now and July 15th, 2010, you will see a number of content services in PlayOn listed as “Premium Preview” – this is to give you a sneak preview of some of the content that you will have access to as a Premium subscriber. Please note that this content will no longer be accessible after July 15th 2010. We hope you enjoy these previews and encourage you to upgrade on July 15th.

Why are we doing this? The annual subscription fee will fund continued development and support. We want to ensure that we can always give the latest and greatest content and service to our entire user base. The on-going subscription fee will allow that. Give it a shot – we think you’ll like what you see.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us at support@playon.tv

If you love PlayOn, and you are a C# programmer - we may have the perfect job for you! We are currently looking for a project designer/coder to help make PlayOn even better.
 
Skills: C#/ .NET, Interop/p-invoke/COM (Win32 APIs)
 
Experience: Building robust fully-featured commerical applications; experience with Media Applications
 
General: Rock Star!
 
If interested, please contact jobs@playon.tv.
 

OK - if you are a PlayOn junkie, and you know all about supporting software. If you enjoy digging through logs to figure out what is going on. If you are resourceful, reliable and friendly and like to work online and over chat and email...and you write well. We need to hear from you. Email us at jobs@playon.tv and let's figure out if we have your dream job!

We are excited to announce that PlayOn officially supports the Nintendo Wii -- in Beta. That means the almost 25 million Wii owners can watch Hulu, Netflix, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Amazon VOD, YouTube, AdultSwim, Crackle and much more on their TV, from their couch, using their Wii Remote. Here is what it looks like:

This is the first device where we have control over the User Interface, and we have tried to make it as intuitive, user friendly and pretty as possible. You be the judge.

PlayOn for the Wii is available for a free, full-featured 14-day trial, and after that licenses are available for a one-time fee of $39.99. That same license (and the same software download) will support your PS3, Xbox 360 and other DLNA devices.

How it works: PlayOn uses the "Internet Channel" on the Wii - so if you don't have this, you will need to get it. After downloading and installing PlayOn on your PC, you then open the "Internet Channel" web browser on your Wii, press the "WWW" button and enter playon.tv as the web address. You should add this page to your Wii Browser "Favorites" to make it easy to access in the future. 

That's it! You can click on Hulu and find your favorite shows, or Netflix and watch that movie you have talking about seeing - right from your couch and Wiimote.

Wii support has been one of the most requested features from our users, and we are thrilled to offer this Beta release to folks who would like to give it a whirl.

PlayOn supports the broadest selection of Internet-to-TV premium content, including Hulu, Netflix, XBS, ESPN, CNN, Amazon VOD, and YouTube. And the selection of niche content is growing daily via the open PlayOn Plugin architecture, which currently includes:

• Adultswim
• Cartoon Network
• Channel9
• Crackle
• Food Network
• GameTrailers.com
• HGTV
• Local Files
• NBA
• NFL
• Southpark Studios
• Spike TV
• Podcasts (OPML Player) -- with dozens of available feeds!
• International channels: Danish DR and Spanish TVE

PlayOn works on a broad range of devices including PLAYSTATION 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Moxi HD DVR, VuNow, and many other DLNA-compliant devices.

We hope you enjoy the Wii Beta and encourage you to send us feedback at support@playon.tv.

It's back. Amazon Video On Demand is back up and running (though still in Beta) in PlayOn. Give it a whirl. And - give us feedback on what you think support@playon.tv.

Based on our quick survey of PlayOn users, 37.5% are replacing cable/satellite with PlayOn while 62.5% of us are supplementing our current programming with Internet video through PlayOn. To me, that says OTT (Over-the-Top), or taking Internet Video to the TV, is growing the overall TV-consumption pie. That is good news for the cable companies. This 37.5% actually compares to a predicted 30% by TDG (since we were only surveying OTT-users, we had to elimiate the segment from TDG that said they would not consume OTT). Pretty close on! Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey!

A recent TGD study, as shared with us by Will Richmond in his VideoNuze newsletter, says that 20% of us will replace our cable/satellite subscription with Over The Top Broadband (OTT) services, while 17% of us will use OTT and keep Cable/Satellite. 29% of us could go either way (depending on the price point). You can check out the research here. What I want to know - is what are you using PlayOn for -- REPLACING your cable/satellite subscription or SUPPLEMENTING it? Take our quick 1-question survey to let us know - I'll publish the results here in a few days!

The latest release .3496 has been posted. It is a good one and we are excited about it. It offers a new free trial for anyone and everyone - so if you got short-changed with a service outage during your last trial - here's your chance to try it again. Oh - and speaking of service outages, we fixed most of those issues in this release as well - so PlayOn should be much more stable and easy to enjoy now. Also in the release is a new PlayOn Settings chanel where you can get info right on your console (no need to head back to the PC) and the ability to reboot your PlayOn server from the console. We upgraded the Local File Sharing (beta) - so it should be more stable. It still isn't where we want it to be, but we are getting it there. Of course - feedback is welcome support@playon.tv. Hope you enjoy the enhancements - and give PlayOn another shot.

Have you been implemented your fair share of online customer support solutions?  Do you know all about supporting software? Are you entrepreneurial, resourceful, reliable and friendly? Are you passionate about PlayOn? We may have THE job for you -- if you are a Technical Support Guru and know about self-serve support systems as well as the best ways to manage online support, let us know -- we need to know how we can make our technical support scale as we grow! If you are interested (or know someone who would be great for this), email us at jobs@playon.tv.

Get 'em while they're hot! Our CTO and apparently t-shirt designer extraordinare has created some pretty cool PlayOn gear. You can get it at our new store PlayOn Gear.

Check it out - and if you have any suggests for modifications that would improve the appearance of something - let us know. Thanks.