Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

About three weeks ago, I received a large envelope from IceTV which contained a prospectus and an offer to buy in their upcoming public share offering. I'd subscribed to them for a month when I was having with the TV guide for my MythTV setup - NineMSN had changed their site again specifically in order to bugger up people who used the NineMSN guide ripper. I knew it was going to happen again, and I preferred the idea of paying for known-good TV guide information.

In that month I discovered the OzTiVo project's http://www.tvguide.org.au and converted over to using their guide information. OK, it doesn't have the week's solid coverage that IceTV does, but it's free and its community-supported and I already had a username on the OzTiVo Wiki, which you need to download your guide information. Once the IceTV subscription ran out I changed over and haven't looked back.

Now, I've already been bitten by the IPO monster. I used to be an "Agent Of Chaos" - a Chaos Music 'frequent buyer' - and when they had an IPO back in, oh, 1998 or so I thought it was a good idea. After all, CD sales were increasingly internet-based, and Chaos Music was the leader in the field. How could it go wrong?

I bought my $3000 of shares at $1.00 each. They went up to $1.43 in a day or three, and then dropped like a stone. Last time I saw them listed, they were at three cents each; then they disappeared because they were offered back to the owner of Chaos Music as junk stock. Funnily enough I received no notification of that one, and finding the information itself required extensive searching of the Chaos Music website. So there's $3000 I'll never see again.

To me, IceTV looks similar. Yes, it's unique in offering a subscription-based EPG in Australia, but both HWW and EBroadcast - the companies that have the legal rights to the guide data in Australia - are setting up portals and gearing up to sell their data AFAICS. There's the free tvguide.org.au source, which more and more people will turn to as time goes on. There's D1.com.au, which has said in the past that MythTV users can use their EPG information and then, from what I understand, locked it off so you can't. There's also the possibility of the other companies who put TV guides on the web, such as NineMSN, to start offering their own subscription services. As soon as the EPG-enabled PVRs have started to 'get good market penetration', everyone and her Aibo is going to want a piece of the pie.

(Gordon Capital's prospectus on the IceTV offering does mention this. The fact that they identify the main competitors for EPG information as being Telstra and Foxtel, rather than anyone who actually owns or distributes EPG information, makes their understanding of the market look, to me, rather minimal.) So I'm not going to buy IceTV shares. This does not constitute legal or financial advice, and if you trust it and you lose money I don't care. I wish IceTV all the luck in the world, because to me it looks like a bunch of people who have tried to do the right thing and have been free and open about what they're offering. But once the gorillas start wanting that banana trees, the smaller forest dwellers aren't going to have an easy time of it.