Ah, it;s the classic story. Big company buys smaller company and rebrands its product. Then big company decides it doesn't need the smaller company's product and shunts it off to the side, bringing forth something completely different instead.
Okay, maybe not so classic, but it's starting to look like that's Yahoo's plan for PVR software. The search giant purchased Meedio last year, and almost immediately rebranded Meedio's PVR software as Yahoo! Go TV with a new purple interface. There were a some nice features, including easy access to online video content.
Now it looks like Yahoo's decided to go a different route, showing off its My Channel software at CES. Dave Zatz snapped a few photos, and it really doesn't look like it's based on the Go TV platform. It's possible that it's just a new user interface, but it's also possible that Yahoo's written two completely different programs designed to do the same thing. It's been known to happen.
Anyway, seeing as how you can't even get to the Go TV website anymore, it looks like if Yahoo plans to move forward with PC-based PVR software, you can expect to call it My Channel, rather than Go TV.
1. Pablo here with Yahoo! Connected Life group. The site was temporarily down for maintenance and is now back up and running. You can still download Yahoo! Go for TV at http://go.connect.yahoo.com/go/tv.
Posted at 1:47PM on Jan 18th 2007 by Pablo Pissanetzky