Believe me, we are well (too?) aware of all the hurdles on our way. That is the beauty of innovation though. Thankfully, we are plenty of big and small companies out there working on getting more content online.

Being aware of what is coming does not mean you can move or want to move on a dime. All these companies have been running the same business model for quite a while now, taking a different approach will take time.

In the meantime, we will work on gathering momentum for our open platform. Critical mass will go a long way to allow use to strike content deals when the time is right.

Not initially at least, but it’s sure an idea for further improvement.

So no RSS-like feed capabilities ala Miro, etc?

They realized nothing of the kind. Hulu and its ilk exist because the mass media execs learned from the recording industry debacle with napster, the iTunes store, etc, and know with no alternative everybody will just bittorrent the shows with no ads at all. Which, I’ll add, many are doing even _with_ Hulu because they still offer better quality and can be streamed to their TV with an xbox360 or PS3.

Anyway back on topic, the best you can hope for is to be ignored; in which case they won’t purposefully try to block you but also won’t hesitate to change their site for whatever reason (branding, redesign, promotions, etc) either. So you might avoid the arms race, but it’ll still be a game of catch-up. If I were basing my business model on streaming internet video, I’d be really nervous with content sharing agreements in place. Slingmedia did it with the slingcatcher and sling.com; they will play ball.

Content providers could certainly try to make our lifes harder if they want to, but do they really? Their execs seem to have realized over the last couple of years that the internet could increase their viewership if they have the content readily and easily available. And their goal is just that, put their stuff in front of more eyeballs to be able to charge more for ads. As Nero pointed out, we direct people to the sites of the content providers, so viewers see what the providers want them to see.

The other advantage of content delivered over the internet is the unmatched level of interactivity the medium brings to the table. By sharing/recommending videos to friends and family, you just make it easier for everyone to watch shows, movies and clips.

As long as you don’t temper with the content and deliver it as is, I am quite positive content providers will be quite happy to see their shows easily accessible.

The ones that might not be happy with that are the Cable and Satellite TV providers. At this stage, we are more of a complement to their service, but it is clear that Internet TV is a threat to their business as it exists today since they happen to be the middle man. They can either hold their ground and fight this trend, or come up with their own internet TV solution. Comcast with its Fancast site did the later and I think we will start seeing more of that in the months to come.

Regarding 802.11n is mainly a matter of cost, it’s still pretty expensive at the moment.

Regarding those other shows you mentioned, I suppose you meant to ask about non-TV shows. Well, we aren’t directly supporting them right now in the sense that you won’t be able to browse into them by season or by episode, but you can still find some of the episodes by using the search function.

However we have already planned features that allow people to contribute to the database. Initially by being able to flag search results as “hey, this is episode 45 of Cranky Geeks” (so that others can browse to it without searching). Later this will be expanded to allow people to create and maintain their own shows, in the sense of adding episode lists, recaps, linking episodes the to videos etc. etc.

In a month all the above is probably going to be already implemented, if things go according to plan.