Pick Up a Wii and Drop Cable TV?

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 11:23 am

Launched around two months ago, Moowee aggregates content from sites like YouTube, Google Video and dailymotion and makes it television friendly. Moowee manages to integrate and exploit the social networking aspects of the UCG sites to create custom and shared channels. They have created a relatively simple guide that is more television-like, than computer-like; clips streams in a continuous fashion allowing users to lean back and be spoon-fed their UCG. It has separate windows for the content and the various meta-data. For instance, this description will appear in a banner below its associated video. The quality of the videos was better than expected, even when in full-screen mode. The quality of the video is only as good as the source encoding, however, and the quality difference was noticeable from program to program. The quality definitely appeared better on the Wii, as compared to my laptop. Channel selection is amazingly fast and they have different categories including channels created by Moowee (eg Anime, Arts, etc.), selected by Moowee (Moopix), voyeuristic viewing (watching what other people are watching) and custom channels selected either by the viewer or by other viewers. It is also possible to search using the Wii's on-screen keyboard and find videos associated with a given search term. It is also possible to create a channel from that search term; check out the Viodi channel that briefly appears at the end of the video that follows this article. The best ...