Mueve la antena!, que no se ve la tele!!!

El pasado día 18 de Mayo de 2009, los administradores del sevicio que posibilita Astaroth's TV (SplashCast) me enviaron el siguiente mail:

SplashCast will be discontinuing its free service for publishers effective 12:00 AM June 1, 2009.

We’ve made this decision given our focus on developing our “Social TV” product and expanding our TV application network.

Three months ago, we asked you (our publishing community), whether you would be willing to pay for the service. The vast majority answered "no." Furthermore, among those willing to pay, the average amount was extremely low. We discussed this in more detail in an earlier blog post.

Additionally, advertising is not a realistic option. We’ve explored several approaches. While we love your content, advertisers aren’t willing to pay a reasonable price to sponsor it [As an aside, this is the issue that YouTube faces on a monumental scale.]

Beyond subscription fees and advertising, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about other, more creative, approaches. The unfortunate conclusion is that continuing our free service does not make business sense (we even considered a public broadcasting-like pledge drive).

We’ve listened. We’ve thought creatively. We’ve weighed the alternatives. We’ve slept on it.

In terms of alternatives, you might check out a service called Embedr. Here is a recent review on the ReadWriteWeb blog. If you know of other services, please let us know.

Thanks for being a part of the SplashCast community. This is a tough (and sad) decision for us. We hope that you can understand that, as a startup, we have to focus.

Sincerely,
The SplashCast Team

Resumiendo, y lo poco que he podido entender con mi mal inglés y el traductor de Google xD, es que nos dejan sin tele a partir del día 1 de Junio de 2009, vamos!, este lunes.

Astaroth's TV es (y será hasta el lunes :p) un conjunto de "canales" con contenidos de YouTube seleccionados por mí, entre los que se podía encontrar música, curiosidades, tecnología, etc.


Así que mi consejo es que aprovechéis todo lo que podáis a jartaros de tele, que el lunes se cierra el grifo :p! Siempre se puede intentar suplir con listas de reproducción de YouTube, pero ésto tenía más glamour :p.