This isn't going to be another post comparing the merit of the Wii to the AppleTV. But it is important to state for the record why a team of Mac fans chose Nintendo's hardware over Apple's. Consider it a wish list for Mr. Jobs:

• standards compliant browser - our biggest unmet need? support for Flash 9, but that's really Adobe's ball and we can rectify that when we spec our own hardware/software stack
• support for third party developers - Alan Quatermain is a genius angel for making it possible to build applications in anticipation of some unspoken future when Apple lets third party developers at their box or at least promises not to firmware "upgrade" them off. Nintendo actually customized the Opera browser to allow functions that are particular to the Wii experience (like the Wiimote) which is a great help for developers.
• The Wimote - if you haven't used it, you may not know what I mean, but I think the biggest interface advance last year was not the iPhone's touch screen, it's the Wiimote IR sensor. Did you know it can point at stuff and drag it around from like 10 feet away. Seriously, you've got to come over to our office and try it.
• number of devices connected to TVs - total Apple TV sales are measured in thousands, Wii sales are measured in millions (and Apple TV had a year head start).

Perhaps the biggest gap for Apple TV for our purposes is a cultural one: the overwhelming download mentality of the product design. iTunes and the iTunes Music Store were breakthroughs for the digital music transition: a) preserved the transaction business model b) downloads allow for easiest repeat usage. Problem is in video a) repeat views are the exception b) the business model is media based. Hence the initial linking of AppleTV to iTunes on a desktop, and the persistence iTunes download distribution even though Take 2 is freed from the desktop proxy is a square peg/round hole.

But it wasn't until we became a Wii developers that we realized the unique advantage of the device. Even if the Apple TV fills all the gaps above and forgoes the download mentality, it will still lack the Wii's spirit of approachability. The Wii is the most social hardware device I have ever used. Obviously, devices like the mobile phone are more pervasively revolutionary for social interaction so that's not what I mean. The Wii is social in the same way IRC was: it empowers/emboldens shy people to participate in social activities. It breaks down real barriers to interaction and assumptions of power (but that's a topic worthy of discussion all its own). Suffice an example: my 5 year old niece can legitimately beat her dad at Wii bowling, and he still finds enjoyment in the subtleties of the control set. The Wii's inherent accessibility means it is a platform to reach people who otherwise wouldn't care to participate/consume the still rarefied world of Internet TV.

This is all to say that we believe the potential disruptor here isn't (primarily) our (or any) application, it's the Wii itself. One thing worth noting: we are by far not the first to try Internet TV on the Wii. Sofa Tube gets credit for planting the idea initially in my head back in 2006. A year later, but perhaps more famously, Stumble Upon took a few weeks to make a Wii custom interface for Stumble Video. What we realized is in our few weeks of working on it is that if you play to the Wii's strengths your application becomes implicitly friendlier. If ffwd takes credit for anything, it is in setting the upper most bar for a video user experience on the Wii. And what we accomplished truly shocked us.

We think "The Wii is a social entertainment device" is an important realization to share, so for the first time we are actively encouraging the spread of a meme. We've got one 2000 Wii points card (that's approximately 2 classic games) for up to 5 bloggers who trackback this story from a blog with a page rank of at least 5 (as proofed at PRChecker). If we don't get enough over 5s we'll go to the 4s and then the 3s (yay! everyone can play). If this is an effective incentive we may go buy more cards to give a way. First come first served and keep in mind we'll eventually need your contact info to send you the card.

Thanks to Ian Schafer the CEO of Deep Focus, the web got a rundown on YouTube's Videocracy event in New York last night. The audience was apparently mostly marketing/advertising folks and the message was geared toward them, but there were a few product developments mentioned that suggest YouTube is about to go through the same identity crisis that the early players in the digital music transition went through.

The new features announced amount to early steps in the "socialization" of YouTube's distribution hegemony. I could be making the wrong analogy, but if it is anything like music, the essential strategic logic is that now that we appear to be on the road to lock-in on distribution/audience share, what value can we add on top of that to increase margins. This is coupled with trying to curb the low level of engagement (time spent per session, for instance). This line of thinking almost always results in some form of "power to the people" tactics for promoting content. To wit in YouTube's case:

• What YouTube tries to differentiate by calling it "active sharing" but is actually yet another implementation of the status functionality made popular by Facebook
• Collaborative filtering (again)
• Simple audience management tools as a preface to asking (soon begging) content creators to make YouTube their publishing homepage (i.e. don't buy your own URL and identity)
• ubiquity, meaning publish once watch anywhere

This is the most reasonable direction for YouTube to go, considering their options, but as the title of the event makes clear, it is really an attempt to claim the mantle of an idea (video democracy) which, and this is my key point, they are intrinsically against.

Full democratization of a space/industry should include a choice of distribution options. YouTube's conceit over the next year will be: anybody can participate, everybody has opportunity, and the vox populi will be heard, choices are limitless...as long as we all to choose to put our very colorfully differentiated eggs in YouTube's distribution basket. I repeat, this is a reasonable claim for YouTube to make and I'll add a reasonable bargain for the creator community to take, but with one important caveat: that there remains no other option.

What YouTube will (should, must) try to do in the video marketplace is exactly analogous what Amazon has tried to do with Marketplace, Fulfillment by Amazon, Advantage, etc. Amazon attempted to leverage their retail hegemony to co-opt the independence of smaller sellers. Likewise, YouTube is leveraging its distribution hegemony to co-opt the independence of smaller publishers. However, Amazon is not the company synonymous with the democratic marketplace. eBay is.

eBay was founded a year after Amazon, and while it wasn't exactly conceived along this line of thought, it does represent the best answer to the question: what would a place to buy things look like if you even democratized the sales/distribution chain? There would be no hegemonic warehouse, no single shipment provider, no single payment method (to wit, eBay's failed attempt to push BillPay). eBay, was originally thought of just as an auction company, then a marketplace, but in the context of this discussion I'd like to propose they are, in fact, a transaction information organization company.

One obvious criticism to this analogy that I'd like to put to rest quickly is that we shouldn't compare a retail space to an ad supported one. That criticism is just currency semantics. While consumers don't spend dollars at YouTube, they do spend time. In fact, this provides an opportunity to deepen the analogy. Just as it is in Amazon's interest that you spend your dollars at their site on items where they have the highest margin (lowest cost). It is in YouTube's interest that you spend your time at their site in a way that taxes their resources least (either watching video that someone else is paying to distribute/promote, or click around not watching video at all). eBay on the other hand, and this is a restatement of my key point doesn't need to care about any of this...they care about the total number of transactions.

One last point, before I get to the conclusion you can guess is coming. There is no strong evidence that one of these paths trumps the other. eBay's market cap is currently ~15% higher than Amazon's, but I'm sure the opposite was true at some point. Regardless both are worth over $30 billion Both continue to suffer from constant pressure on their core businesses and the need to expand into other areas to justify the valuation (Skype, Kindle). Both companies have made missteps trying to adopt the other's intrinsic natures (zShops, BillPay).

And now the proclamation you've all been waiting for. It's time for an eBay of the video space and ffwd is committed to building it. A democratic video information organization company that doesn't care which distribution platform you use and whose goal is to maximize the use of a viewer's time (currency)? Call us crazy, but we won't stop until we've either produced a worthy counterpart to hegemony, or flame out trying.

Get your thumb ready! We've been talking about this for a while, but I hope you can still share my excitement for getting it out the door. People's eyes light up when I tell them about the future we are aiming for, channels of Internet content streamed to your TV, but then they come back to earth saying, but that's not happening anytime soon. That's what we thought, too: 2010 probably, 2009 maybe. but then last fall I was approached by a consumer electronics manufacturer with a question.

Q: What do you think Internet TV should look like?

A: Why do you ask?

Q: Well we are putting this here Internet jack in our TVs next year and we're wondering what else we could do with it.

A: Next Year! Uh I mean, we've got some ideas. Interested?

Well now it is...next year...and I'm proud to reveal the first product to use the ffwd platform for delivering Internet TV to your, uh, TV. Everything you've saved to your ffwd account will be there waiting for you. You'll also be able to discover new favorites based on your profile and what others are watching. Existing beta users point your Wii browsers to http://www.ffwd.com and we'll automatically detect your Wii-ness. Others can see screen captures and more information at http://www.ffwd.com/wii

Happy channel surfing...ffwd can make it easier...but only your couch can make it this comfortahhhhhh...

At ffwd we believe that  over the next six years or so, some really smart people are going to develop really smart methods for recommending video content and our goal is to provide a frame work for those methods to get sorted out according to the viewers they work for. In the meantime, we are building our own recommendation methods because we need them to test the framework, but we  already discussing integration strategies with some early pure-play recommendation companies and working with Mashery on a system for user initiated private info sharing.It's not obvious from the ffwd interface, so it is worth mentioning explicitly, as a video preference repository, ffwd wants users to be able to what they want with their data and where they want to. Therefore, at a very basic level, Michel can put away his worries that ffwd's success will aggravate the zero-sum game effect. Quite the contrary ffwd benefit from the adoption of portable user profiles as he describes it.

The user gets to experiment with which site has the algorithms and user base to provide good ratings in which situations, and the services get to compete on how good they do their jobs

See we take this notion a step further, namely a user shouldn't be forced to jump from site to site (UI to UI) in order to try out recommendation algorithms. Moreover, once they've found some they like they should be able to access them separately or in aggregate from a single interface. Most importantly they should be provided accurate info on how those methods are performing for them so they can guided amongst them wisely. Serving this set of needs is really where ffwd fits into the ecosystem. We plan to build a platform where a suite of general services are provided to recommendation companies so they can focus on building the best recommendation methods.

We were happy to see some coverage of our new video API on ProgrammableWeb's blog today. Their coverage of 30 Video APIs was also a quick reminder to us that the field of competition is heating up fast for both developers and consumers of video APIs, especially those that can be meshed into new types of social networking apps that make it easier for you and your friends to figure out how to "waste time more intelligently" when looking for videos (not my phrase, but it seems entirely appropriate in this context).

As we continue to roll out functionality on our beta site, we will be extending our API into other areas, which is pretty exciting for us. We're now in the process of enhancing our API to solve two distinct problems: how to let users know what's worth watching on the web, and how to let users know who else is watching it with them.  As always, we'll let you know as soon as this is available for you to try out.

If you are a beta site user, you can apply for a Developer API key now.