Soon we will be dropping beta

… and by soon I mean in the coming weeks. In the spirit of transparency we want to communicate the message to our beta users in advance. From the get-go we have tried to keep you guys involved in what is happening here on our blog, in the comments, on our Facebook wall, via Twitter and by e-mailing status updates. While some beta users have been more engaging than others we are grateful for everyone who has pitched in with a comment, a question or a suggestion. There are even a few with whom we are in daily contact with. You know who you are :p.

Since starting playmoTV beta last October we have gone through three stages. First the focus was on the system foundations, adding new channels and devices. Soon after New Years’ growing the number of users was priority no. 1 and for the last few weeks financial sustainability has been our mantra. Each stage has had its challenges but it has been a lot of fun and I really feel everyone in the team has learnt a thing or two and grown personally as a consequence.

Every new user will be able to test drive playmoTV for 7 days for free

When we drop beta we will start charging $4⁹⁹/mo with the option to buy 1, 3, 6 and twelve months or simply by monthly subscription for convenience. There will however be a discount for those who commit themselves to a longer billing period:

12 months @ $49⁹⁹ (17% discount)
6 months @ $25⁹⁹ (13% discount)
3 months @ $13⁹⁹ (7% discount)

The journey ahead

We are extremely excited about the future. So far we have been busy implementing redundancy servers (reducing the single-point-of-failures), improving our monitoring system, installing provisioning software (for faster deployments), adding more support e.g. for Hulu Plus, Xbox 360, and we have secretly added others (now in testing); Roku box, Boxee, rdio, last.fm.

Once playmoTV is financially sustainable there are great many ideas we have to improve and grow the service. Just to name a few in no particular order; optimise the choice data centre with respect to your geographical location, create a tray application allowing you to switch between playmoTV DNS settings and your original one, add support for UK channels, provide a solution for users behind ISP transparent proxies (non-direct Internet connection).