When I 1st saw that ThePinoy.tv is sponsoring the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, I got excited and thought that it was going to be a Philippine version of Revision3 or Joost. The thought of a Pinoy IPTV network makes my mouth water. I’ll admit that I was disappointed when I found out that it’s only a video contest. Regardless, I think that there’s a lot of potential.

Talent shows are nothing new to Pinoys with the daily bombardment of exploitation contests on noontime Philippine network TV and the more recent imports such as American Idol and Big Brother. The Pinoy TV contest is simple compared to other online contests by Ksolo and Bix. Submit your video based on the monthly theme and the one who receives the most votes by the users, win $100.

I believe the business model will be to attract visitors to view the submissions and make money on ads and sponsored contests. Make your own Sarsi commercial sponsored by Sarsi. With The Pinoy TV not hosting any video, they save a ton of money on hosting fees and headaches that come with hosting large files. The bad thing there is that they are reliant on YouTube and GoogleVideos (those are currently the only 2 video hosting sites supported at the moment). If YouTube goes down for maintenance, The Pinoy TV site is pretty much worthless. When YouTube also starts their Adsense for video, how will that affect these sites relying on their own contextual ads?

The Pinoy TV is run by Minic Media out of NYC. I always find it interesting when Pinoys who are based “abroad” try to aim a service to the Philippines. It can be successful but challenging as I have experienced. Dominic, if your reading this, put up a video of yourself talking about your site. I find it ironic that a video site doesn’t have any company videos of their own.

Possible issues:
* The logo resembles YouTube and TVGuide too closely.
* There’s always a little danger when relying on a 3rd party service for your content.
* The “The” in ThePinoy.TV bugs me. There might be a branding problem. People might type pinoytv.com or pinoy.tv. “The” tells me that you were a bit too late in registering your domain.
* While one of the goals of the site is to “Bring the Philippines closer to everyone and at the same time introduce his roots globally through online videos”, I feel that the better quality videos will be from the US rather than the Philippines. Many of the videos I’ve seen from the Philippines are MS MovieMaker slideshows, pixalized camera phone videos or Philippine network shows. However, there are some exceptions.
* How many people in the Philippines have a Paypal or Xoom account?
* What will they do when people try to game the system?
* People submitting OPC (Other People’s Content)?

Possible features in the future:
* I can see how this can turn in to a social network where people sign up submit their videos, have friends, leave comments, rate and etc.
* An API where submitters can add a vote button on their site ala Digg but then someone may win just because of the amount of votes they get from their fans. HappySlip or Pinoy Rickey could win every month just based on their # of visitors.
* Gallery view - It’s kind of tedious to go though all the videos 1 by 1.
* Online video editing
* File conversion
* RSS

The Mom Test
I don’t think my mom would be interested in this. #1 she doesn’t upload videos or is interested in the $100. #2 If she wanted to learn more or see some videos about the Philippines, she would just go straight to YouTube. (more about The Mom Test)