Messenger TV

Now that Messenger TV has been announced by John Mangelaars (with some interesting info in the article), it has been getting quite a bit of news coverage. The following are some links to news and blog stories about Messenger TV, in addition to the interview on CNN posted here.

News & Blogs: Reuters, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg.com, Seattle Times, Calgary Herald, vnunet.com, Guardian, Pocket-lint, LiveSide, and many more. Note that these are just the English ones  - there are quite a few in all of the other languages that Messenger TV supports.

Microsoft's official press release for Messenger TV is here.

The blog for the guy who was tasked with building this first version of Messenger TV (Brian Groth) has a bit more information too.

The team in the UK just wrote a good article on how to run Messenger TV. To summarize:

1. Get Windows Live Messenger if you don't already have it.
2. Start chatting to a friend and select Messenger TV from the list of activities, or just click here to start it, which will prompt you to select a friend to share Messenger TV with. (See the images below for the list of activities and the icon to get to them when you are in a text chat.)
3. If you don't have any friends online, add MessengerTV@Live.com as a friend and start a text chat. It will invite you to start Messenger TV.

This version of Messenger TV will be available in 20 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, & the UK). This represents 12 languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, & Swedish).

Messenger TV looks at whatever language you have selected in your web browser, then pulls all of the navigation from http://video.msn.com for that country.

In Internet Explorer, you can select Tools, Internet Options to see your Language settings. For example, in the UK (en-gb), it looks like:

When you visit http://video.msn.com, you see a menu and sub-menu items for MSN Video, such as the following for the UK (en-gb, to be specific):

Messenger TV combines this language setting from IE with the navigation for MSN Video and creates the navigation in Messenger TV. 

This menu for MSN Video is unique to each of those 20 countries where Messenger TV is available, just like MSN Video is a unique experience for each country too. 

You can learn more about Messenger TV at http://MessengerTV.msn.com, but it will soon release to 20 countries in 12 languages. That means that it will be available in most countries where MSN Video is available. Japan and the USA are the two big countries not represented right now. You can try it out for yourself by adding the Windows Live Agent MessengerTV@live.com as a contact in Messenger and starting a conversation with it.

See http://MessengerTV.msn.com for the "real" instructions, but here is what you will see when using Messenger TV:

1. Select a channel:

2.  Build a playlist:

3. Watch the videos:

See the original version at http://www.messenger.it/messengertv.html which inspired the creation of a new version for all countries that have MSN Video.