Time Warner Cable quietly launched PhotoShowTV in Staten Island last week. I say quietly because it appears there was very little press coverage. Granted the service was already operating in Hawaii, but this is the first time PhotoShowTV has been available on the mainland, so to speak. And it’s a very cool service.

SimpleStar’s PhotoShow has been around for quite a while as a simple tool for creating photo slideshows with music, graphics and even some animations. (Comcast subscribers can download the Deluxe version on Comcast.net) The TV part comes in with the combination of PhotoShow and Time Warner’s VOD service. Staten Island TWC subscribers can now create PhotoShows online and then submit them for public viewing on a local VOD station. In other words, what you create in your living room can be watched on Grandma’s TV screen across town. (more…)

A million years ago, and for a very brief period of time, I did some public relations work with the Comcast High-Speed Internet division. At the time, Comcast was pushing its Comcast.net portal as a destination site for news, video, entertainment and applications like photo sharing and shopping. Unfortunately, only Comcast subscribers could access everything on the site, so it wasn’t a very attractive story to the consumer media.

Anyway, today Comcast announced that it’s adding Fandango to its online portal (for $200 million?). Not Comcast.net, but the upcoming Fancast.com. Apparently Fancast will offer search and organizing functionality for video across a number of different devices and channels. (TV, computers, DVDs, etc.) Kind of a modern-day TV Guide.

Om Malik wondered who would own the new TV Guide space, and Broadband Daily has an article today (subscription only) about how Comcast is trying to compete with Yahoo and Google portals.

My question is: do we really need a portal site anymore? I love widgets and would rather get just the content and applications I want in widget form. Sure, I’ll still need a guide to find good content on the Web and on the TV, but why get it on a portal? Widgets are wonderful. Can Fancast.com be anything more than Fandango-tastic?

The latest study out of Nielsen Research (also covered by MultiChannel News) has a raft of interesting TV statistics. But since we all know how deceiving numbers can be, I thought I’d add a little context to the facts and figures. For your reading pleasure…

Boob Tube-onomics

• There are an average of 111.4 million TV homes in the United States for the 2006-07 TV season.
Given a US population of around 300 Million, with an average household of 2.5 people (see below), this means that roughly 93% of American homes have TVs.

• The average U.S. TV home has 2.5 people and 2.8 television sets.
The primary TV in consumer homes was bought at an average price of $783. Not cheap, but even doubled or tripled it’s a lot less expensive than .5 of a kid for your typical couple.

• 28% of U.S. TV homes have digital cable.
More than half of cable subscribers to the top two cable companies get digital services: 52% of Comcast subscribers and 54% of Time Warner subscribers.

More after the jump…

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Well, sort of. The NCAA and CBS SportsLine announced back in February that they’d be offering all NCAA tournament games online again this year for free. (Woohoo!) As a pre-registered, VIP member, I got into the streaming application pretty quickly, though I did get a few error episodes along the way. Unfortunately, the video seems to cut out pretty frequently. Since they’re showing the game I want on TV at the moment, and for the first time ever I’m home during the tournament, I think I’ll be watching the big screen.

By the way, NewTeeVee predicted this “perfect bandwidth storm”. How true. How true.

And, wondering what the “Boss” button brings up? Here you go. Slightly undermined by the title bar at the top…

The Uverse users site is running a poll to see what feature people most want added to the service (AT&T’s IPTV offering). With a whopping 109 votes in (okay, that’s probably a decent percentage of Uverse users…), the winner is whole-home DVR.

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There tends to be a lot of confusion around the term IPTV. It doesn’t mean video streamed over the free-and-clear Internet like YouTube. It means television that is streamed over a regulated IP network. In other words, IPTV requires some service provider manage the quality and security of the television experience.

Yesterday Google warned publicly that the Web cannot support broadcast-quality Internet TV over the long term. The system won’t scale. So what does Google plan to do about it? Apparently the company wants to work with cable operators to “combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.”

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If you watched the Super Bowl last night, chances are you tuned in for and even repeat-viewed some of the commercials. It’s the one time of year when couch potatoes actually want to watch ads, and TiVo capitalized on the phenomenon by making certain commercials download-able for enthusiastic fans.

Top Ten

1. Bud Light: Language Course with Carlos Mencia

2. Bud Light: Rock Paper Scissors

3. FedEx: Don’t Judge

4. Nationwide: Kevin Federline Rollin’ VIP

5. Doritos Crash the Super Bowl

6. CareerBuilder: Office Jungle

7. Blockbuster: Mouse

8. Doritos Crash The Super Bowl: Checkout Girl

9. Chevrolet: Everybody Loves a Chevy

10. Schick: Quarto Science

Given its new ad agency, maybe next year TiVo will have its own Super Bowl commercial?