Managing a Cornucopia of Entertainment Choices

Christmas brought a bit of a tech upgrade at mi casa. Twas a long time coming…

I finally knuckled down and hooked up the Roku which I got from FlixFling about a blue moon ago, which meant Hulu+ (for my wife’s Scandal fascination) and my Amazon Prime were quickly inaugurated. Our Apple TV arrived too, which brought Netflix upstairs and down. I think I even saw a button for Crackle on the new Samsung Blu-ray player, but that bears more investigating. Santa even dropped some Blu-ray joy down my chimney too in the form of the The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (Boris Karloff, of course) and Quantum of Solace. Via digital or physical, we have a lot to look forward to in 2013. The entertainment options seem to have exploded.

This cornucopia of delivery and content choices inspired me to cut my Netflix DVD queue by half and my Instant Streaming queue by 30%…just too much great stuff to see, particularly as the films of 2012 move into the home entertainement windows. Roger Ebert (@EbertChicago) calls the movie releases of 2012 one of the best in recent memory. I’m sorry to say that I’ve only seen a couple, but they’ve been excellent.  (Best wishes for good health in the new year, Roger. You’re a national treasure.)

Faced with such a diverse selection of ways to enjoy the best cinema in years, I was pleased to discover a new app, Plizy, which endeavors to simply and centralize all these choices. From the iTunes description:

Plizy is the media center in the cloud that allows users to search, organize, watch and share any movie, show or video that is available online. Plizy aggregates more than 550,000 movies, 200,000 shows and one hundred million videos from the major video services making it the most comprehensive database available on the market. Through Plizy, content can be viewed on the iPad, web and TV, and users can discover new videos based on their interests, preferences and moods. Developed around the social graph, Plizy makes friends part of the viewing experience and uses advanced algorithms to put consumers within one click of any desired video.

While we here at Giant didn’t help with the development of Plizy, we certainly can recognize a good thing when we see it. Apps and media services should solve and problem and the first one to do it, in the best way, wins. Plizy’s got a good headstart. Downloaded and registered, thank you.

We’ve been working on something here that will join this expanding universe of entertainment options. Joining our Indiekid app, we hope to be able to announce our latest addition in early 2013. (Hint: It’ll fit nicely amid the Plizy basket…we may just have to talk to them about that…)

The timing is excellent not only for streaming apps, but also for Plizy (and others like it which are sure to come), too.  TabTimes notes that market penetration of tablet has hit an all time high of nearly 19% in the US and according to their study of Twitter activity, the iPad and iPad Mini were oft-gifted this year and tablet activations on Christmas day skyrocketed (both in absolute numbers and compared to just days before 12/25.)

2013 looks  like it’s going to be a very fine year at the convergence of technology and entertainment.

I can’t wait.