UndoTV Is Not Yet TechTV

For those hoping to see Leo, Chris, and the rest of the TechTV gang back together in all their telegenic geeky glory, the wait will be a bit longer. Multimedia channel creator, PikSpot, in a scramble out of the gate, finally pushed UndoTV, its technology news site, into public beta as of last Thursday.

The lack of ripples in the online video pond is a surprise, considering UndoTV was supposed to be a lasting reunion of TechTV alumni, as organized by internet personalities Leo Laporte, of the TWiT Netcast Network, and Chris Pirillo, of Lockergnome technology portal. But it seems along the way the TechTV alums heading the effort became unsatisfied with or lost interest in PikSpot.

PikSpot, yet another vertical community-building tool, differentiates with its powerful embeddable applet (example video below), where user accounts, comments, tags, ratings and all other contextual information are immediately accessible. PikSpot’s co-founder Scott Waddell claims “it’s content embedding on steroids.”

Pirillo posted on his blog that he was going to rally his and Laporte’s TechTV alumni and bring their “vetted” talent back to UndoTV as they work to undo TechTV specifically and TV generally. (Background: TechTV was a 24-hour cable channel dedicated to all things tech, from gizmos to culture. It saw a large number of notable hosts, including Laporte and Pirillo, as well as Digg’s Kevin Rose, the late James Kim, Patrick Norton, and many other personalities who, when Comcast purchased TechTV, scattered across the intertubes and into various websites and podcasts.) But as of UndoTV’s launch last week there are no TechTV alums to be found. Even on the user-generated side, there is simply not much content being posted to the site.

Pirillo says that this is because, after months of dragging their feet, when PikSpot launched it did not have some of the key features that he and Laporte had been hoping for. The site has no good way to differentiate content from pros versus new faces, which was critical to Laporte and Pirillo’s hope of recreating the TechTV culture, while being able to pick potential new talent from the crowd.

PikSpot’s convergence media model was part of what attracted Pirillo and Laporte initially. The TechTV crew had wanted to get back together, and “PikSpot offered the most foundation and promise,” Pirillo says. Referring to it as an “ecosystem,” Pirillo liked the idea of centralized expression. Disparate blogs, photo galleries, and podcasts could all be brought together and fed via a single user name to an audience.

And this idea still excites Pirillo. “Brand is becoming increasingly decentralized… It doesn’t matter where people find me, if people find me, and that’s the ultimate goal in all of this – discovery.” One day he hopes to have all of his content available through a single applet that will be embedded all over the internet, so that the vast majority of his viewers, readers, and listeners gets its Pirillo-fix away from his main sites.

Complicating matters, since his initial excitement about UndoTV, Pirillo has found a new online video love – UStream. I interviewed Pirillo via cell phone while he was streaming live with a full chat room watching and commenting. So, not only does he was it all in one pretty applet, he wants it all live. “If your media isn’t live, it’s dead,” as he put it.

In the meantime he says he will still be trying to get the TechTV alums back together via UndoTV, and he’s hoping that he will be able to influence this public beta to yield some of the changes that he and Laporte had been hoping for. And UndoTV needs the content – desperately. The site is currently dotted with reposted episodes of various tech podcasts, children playing Wii, and no shortage of TechTV slideshows with pictures culled from the old TechTV yearbook.