You've noticed that we're not updating on schedule, and paperboy has been missing. Here's what's happening with Net4TV, our plans, and how you can help!

Hard Times Hit Net4TV

The economy isn't very good right now, and it's been doubly hard for us. Many of the clients that our "professional" side, Iacta, has depended on have scaled back or even shut down, and the WebTV cookie failure has completely dried up the revenues from our ads and shopping (if they can't see it came from us, we don't get a commission).

That has been a bigger problem than just the money we were receiving: if we can't get revenues from Net4TV's e-commerce links, our business model for the future can't work. Our investors pulled their funding, and advised us to lay off our staff and shut down. You can read more about the details in our Net4TV Friends FAQ page.

PBS Model for Net4TV?

We did have to lay everyone off, but with the encouragement and support of our friends, we're hoping that it won't be necessary to shut Net4TV down. Having no onsite staff except for those few of us who can go without a paycheck for a bit, we're obviously going to have to make some changes.

But with your help, we are hoping that we will be able to keep Net4TV live on the Net while we work on our business side to try to get some revenues flowing from it as well.

Would You Make a Donation?

If you appreciate Net4TV, and want to help to keep us online, we would like to ask you to make a donation. We're not organized as a 501.c.3 (not-for-profit) company, so the donations aren't tax exempt, although our friends who have businesses and would like to make a donation through them will receive a special posting so that it can be written off as advertising cost. But if you can help, either with an amount that Net4TV is worth to you or just some amount that you can afford, we will truly appreciate it and it will help.

We have posted our address and our PayPal account on our Become a Friend page in our Net4TV Friends site. We will apply all of the donations that we receive to the costs of keeping the site online (server costs, power, bandwidth, office rent). If you're not in a position to donate, we understand, but you can still help by getting the word out.

You may think that a small amount may not help, but it really does. If there were a way for us to get the equivalent of a magazine subscription from the people who are our regular readers or who depend on Net4TV for their games, we'd actually have a thriving operation. But we can't make all of Net4TV a "membership model" -- and like PBS, we can't make it by advertising and don't want to force people to pay (we're aware that many of our users are on limited incomes, and really can't pay anything). So, we're hoping that people who care and can help us will do it because they want to. If enough do, we'll be able to keep going.

Our Plans for Net4TV

We are hoping to be able to raise enough to keep our office, servers, and T1 connection in place as they are. It takes a lot of servers to run all of Net4TV as it is currently configured, since we also serve RealAudio, Chat4TV, our games site, our editing utilities for our writers, mail servers, and have staging servers where we develop content before we post it.

If we can keep this structure, we can proceed with relatively little change. Net4TV Voice itself will go to a monthly update, but as soon as we can, we'll set up the news section for more regular updates (and paperboys) so that we can keep you informed. When we find some time away from trying to bring in business, we'll also start using the articles in some new "Centers" so that you can easily find "how to's," community stories, and other information we've published.

If we can't keep the office and our servers, then it's possible that we can go to a "co-location" (rent server space, with connection, at a network center). But we wouldn't be able to duplicate everything we do on the local servers, and we would probably have to re-write our serving system to use a different "middleware" (like CGI). That would take some time and effort and, while we're trying to bring more business in (and then do it, so we can get paid), we have little to spare. This is a fall-back position, but one that we're hoping to avoid. Still, it would be better than just "going dark."

Will this work? We'll have to see how willing our community is to help us. It's a gamble that we'll get enough to keep going -- both for people who make donations, and for us, since we're using the money that was supposed to be used for a "graceful shutdown" to try to stay live. We've been encouraged by the support of some of our friends, though, and we're willing to try. But it's basically up to you. We hope you will.

Image Magick

We will be converting ImageMagick to a subscription basis, though, as soon as we can get the system completed to manage it. It is immensely costly to run, and although it has about 250 avid users and another 1,000 or so occasional users, it uses over twice the bandwidth that the entire rest of Net4TV consumes.

Since the free transloader went down, much of the bandwidth has included a few people who used Image Magick for a purpose other than editing pictures, rather than subscribing to the pay transloader.

It was never intended to do the heavy lifting of a transloader, although some people used it that way. As a result, people who were there to edit photos found ImageMagick busy transferring entire websites worth of graphics, and our bandwidth usage more than doubled.

We had added the upload feature as a convenience to the people who edit images when the Transloader went to a pay model. ImageMagick is NOT a Transloader, and is not as efficient about handling a large number of images as a Transloader is. ImageMagick was never intended to do this heavy lifting, and doesn't do it as efficiently as a "simple" transloader.

We'd like to keep it available, so if folks want it enough to help to pay for it, we can; otherwise, you'll just have to hope that someone else is willing to spend their money and bring it up, because we don't have it to spend any more.

The Longer Term

We think our most difficult time will be this summer and that, by fall, the economy will start to improve. Our professional work is in interactive TV, and although that industry has not been expanding as quickly as we (and everyone else in the industry) had hoped, it IS on its way up -- we're not tied to the failed "dot-com" model and never were.

Unfortunately, if Microsoft/WebTV doesn't fix its problems that provide for e-commerce transactions (the problems go deeper than the current cookie failure, by the way), there is no business model for anyone to provide free services for its users -- whether WebTV/MSNTV, Ultimate TV, or even Microsoft TV (the version for cable) -- that are based on advertising and transaction commissions.

We are going to explore some alternate business models and we have some ideas, but they are going to take time and any potential investors are likely months away. If we can find a model that works, then we may be able to raise some investment for it and continue on the path that we had started, which was to make Net4TV a place that would give set-top box users the information, community, and tools that they need and that the service and box companies won't be providing. If you have ideas, or if you know of any "angel" investors, we'd very much like to hear them.

So, now you know. Are you willing to help? We truly appreciate it if you will. Please join our friends and help keep Net4TV on the Net.

Laura Buddine, aka Dudette
Brian C. Bock, aka Dexter
... and the Friends of Net4TV