PhotoShowTV: Create your own shopping channel

While at DemoFall 2006, I ran into my old friend Jay Tannenbaum, who is the marketing chief at Simple Star. The company's flagship is PhotoShow, which lets users create slide shows with templates, effects, music tracks, animations and other creative features that are common to photo software suites. The company also has distribution and printing deals with a variety partners. The latest partner is Time Warner Cable, which is offering a digital cable channel to host PhotoShow photo and video clip albums. Simple Star CEO Chad Richards demoed PhotoShowTV, which has been in beta in Hawaii only, and requires Time Warner's Road Runner digital broadband service for uploading.

Shows are limited to 5 minutes in length and must be approved (only G-rated content) by the TimeWarner/Simple Star service. The PhotoShowTV programs are available on demand (channel 917), just like any other digital TV content, and you use the remote control to navigate through a program guide of topical channels. Richards envisions people not just putting up vacation or school sports event photos and video clips, but also items for sale, such as cars and homes. It could become a do-it-yourself home shopping channel for the TV generation and beyond.