A few weeks ago I went to a DemoCamp here in Austin. One of the presenters there was Mark Phillip who was talking about his sports community called AreYouWatchingThis (RUWT?). There are a lots of Diggs, Myspaces and youtubes out there but there is only one RUWT. I call RUWT a sports community but it’s more than that. It’s a sports lovers dream. What the hell is RUWT you ask, well it’s a community of sports lovers and one robot who all rate games based on how exciting they are. Then based on what level of alerts you want and how you want to be alerted (email or Text Message) you’ll be sent a message alerting you to an exiting game. Marks has developed something he calls the RUWTbot which basically watches all the games for you and then will alert you when the game gets good.

Doing Laundry. Raking the leaves. Went to sleep early. Are any of these
worthwhile reasons for missing the next instant classic? No, we didn’t
think so either. Sign up for our free alerts and RUWTbot will hit you up by email or text message with the score, time left, and channel you need to turn to to catch the game.

Additionally, there is human interaction via a Digg like voting system. The community activity seems to be pretty small now but I think that’s going change soon as more people take notice. Mark just got a write up in ESPN magazine, so it want be long before the sports fans start signing up. RUWT has plans to get in with the TIVO’s of the world so that your game can automatically start recording when the game gets good. Until that happens RUWT offers an API that will allow enterprising programmers the opportunity to do it themselves.

I can’t wait for basketball season to start up again so that I can use RUWT to it’s full potential.

Since giving up my cable TV, I’ve been playing around with all the internet related “tv” apps/services that I can. Joost, which most of you have heard of has been on of the most talked about companies online in that space. Initially, I wasn’t really impressed, mostly for their lack of content. Lately however, they have been cranking out the content and now Joost has captured more of time than in the past. However I still think that products like the Veoh.tv app will be the future of online “tv”. If you’ve ever wanted to produce video content, now would be the time to start. By the way, I still have a few joost invites left if you need one.