The Latest News about Net4TV - 4/18/2002

It's been almost a year since we "hit the wall," but we're still online, thanks to your help, encouragement, and the donations of some of our friends. Words can't express how much your encouragement and support has meant to us. We would not be here today without it.

Here's what's happened, and where our hopes are. We gave notice on our office space as soon as our lease was up, and essentially moved our operations into my garage (including pulling in a new T-1 so that we could still run our servers -- thanks to a generous donation from one friend who surprised us with a check to cover the installation).

We were fortunate to already have that in the works before 9/11, because if business was slow before that event, it basically dried up for six months afterwards. With donations, credit cards, and tiny little bits of work through the winter, we were able to stay online. With the improving economy -- especially in the iTV field where we work professionally -- we're beginning to get a bit more work and see some improving prospects, although it is still a struggle each month to pay for the T-1, power, phone, and maintenance. Keep your fingers crossed for us, and if you're moved to send a donation, it's still very much needed and appreciated.

You've noticed that we haven't had an update to Net4TV Voice for a year, except for the 9/11 front page. Some day, if we get enough ahead to be able to devote some time to it, we'll try to reorganize the sections so that its a bit easier to find information. Google search is really good (better than our own search engine) at helping you find the story you're looking for -- just use "Net4TV" and then whatever you're looking for in the search string.

Will Net4TV Voice ever return to regular publication? Not as a news magazine -- it's simply too resource intensive to do a good job, and we don't want to try and NOT do a good job. But if our fortunes improve, we may be able some time to start publishing how-to features, Surfaris, and community stories again on a periodic basis.

Interestingly, we're still getting over 12,000 visits per day -- as high as when we were publishing -- and over 1 million page views per month. The reason is our games. If you've noticed that this is the area that is being improved with new games, perhaps you've wondered how we can afford to do that when we're not updating the other sections.

Well, it turns out that the problem that WebTV users have always had -- finding good games that work on the TV browser -- is a problem that iTV users on cable boxes also are going to have. We're getting some interest from cable companies about possibly providing games for them when they launch their services. So this is an opportunity for us to do something that we know WebTV users need, that actually might be able to make us some money in the future! That would be wonderful if we can get it to happen, because then we'd be able to make a LOT of great games for you.

Regarding ImageMagick -- we still have it up, and it's still free for use today. We appreciate the donations that a few ImageMagick users have sent -- it has really helped run this most costly of our services for everyone. We did consider making it a subscription service, but since our system doesn't currently accommodate taking payments, generating and checking passwords and usage, and the accounting for running a subscription service, we felt that it would be a costly distraction from trying to actually make enough money to thrive by our regular work.

We are considering a premium Image Magick -- especially because the free ImageMagick.org can't afford the bandwidth for its service any more, and has started sending its PC users to our server as well. This is slowing things down for everyone. But it still would take some investment to put in such a system, and we don't have the resources to do it at the moment, so it's just something we're thinking about.

We still do run our Sunday chat on Chat4TV each week (3pm to 6pm Pacific time, irc.chat4tv.com #chat4tv channel), so feel free to drop in and visit with us and enjoy a couple of hours with some of our friends. Thanks for all of your support!