Consuming the media you want when you want it isn’t supposed to be this easy, and it’s certainly not supposed to be free. But Graboid is now available to the public, free of charge at Graboid.com. Tell your friends, tell your family, and don’t forget to tell them that you helped make it happen. Your patience and intelligent feedback has been invaluable to us, and although not everything that we’ve got up our sleeves has been revealed today, we hope you like what you see. It’s only the beginning.

The status quo set by BitTorrent, LimeWire and countless other peer-to-peer applications has been permanently altered, and we hope your digital lives are better for it.

Sincerely,
The Graboid Team

Our coming out party is coming up, and we’re going to have a little contest to help us predict what’s going to happen. But first, a little info.

In response to popular demand, and because it’s the right thing to do, there is going to be a FREE version of Graboid. It won’t include download capability or 100% of the content, but it’ll include all the latest TV shows and movies at full streaming speeds.

There will be, of course, a premium version of the product that has all the functionality of our beta software (plus). You’ll be able to get that in a bandwidth limited (50 GB) or unlimited version, at $14.95 and $24.95 respectively.

So the contest. We have no idea how many people are going to want to sign up. But after we started an internal office pool, we realized maybe it would be fun to ask you to guess too. Here’s the question: How many free and premium users do you think will sign up in the first 24 hours after we release the software and do a complete website overhaul?

We’re not going to promote the launch at all other than a blog entry and the existence of a cool new website. Closest guess gets a free 1 month unlimited membership!

Just post your answers on the blog. How many free, how many premium, over the first 24 hours.

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with the Graboid Beta Trial. Anyone who is a current Beta user will get to keep their account until their bandwidth allocation is used up. Thank you to everyone who participated and gave us your valuable feedback. No product is ever perfect, but Graboid 0.9 is just around the corner.

You’ll see the main website get a makeover this week, along with availability of the new version of the software. Initially we’ll be limiting the number of accounts so we can carefully observe what happens. There’s a surprise ahead for people who were expecting this to cost a lot.

We released the latest version of the application yesterday, with notices being posted on the application itself to let current users know. You can download the new version here. Significant changes include rebuffering when the stream is too slow, and the listing of user ratings in the search results. Some people have had a few issues with downloading and installing the new version - this is not universal. Please email us at beta@graboid.com to report problems. In the meantime, we recommend uninstalling the previous version and re-installing the new version.

Improvements and fixes in 0.8.0.1:

• Added ability to choose download and temp directories in preferences
• If the playback buffer runs out: playback now pauses, the buffer refills and then playback resumes (previously stopped playback completely) — this feature is still somewhat experimental
• Fixed the flickering archive window — clicking items could cause Graboid to crash on some systems
• Blank video playback on Vista is fixed (problem with VLC)
• Changed “Archive” terminology to “Download”
• Improved the search field - now stores previous searches and allows you to cancel your current search and return to the complete listings
• Added a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating on all videos, displayed in list view with voting functionality on “more info” bar
• Right clicking archived items brings up context menu including “Reveal in Windows Explorer” — makes it easier to do what you want with your media (play downloaded files in other media players, burn discs, etc.)
• Graboid no longer crashes when remote server is not available during login
• Installation now works with a custom installation location
• Search bar is no longer enabled with no category selected — search would cause Graboid to crash in this case
• Text on login screen is no longer cut off on some machines

Click here to view the changes in progress for the next version.

We’ve gotten quite a few requests for some way of rating content. After much deliberation and some coding, we’ve developed a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system for streaming video playback.

We wanted to go with something simple, so that as many people use it as possible. Here’s the general idea: if it works, give it a thumbs-up. If it doesn’t, vote “thumbs-down.”

This is the type of thing that gets more useful as more people use it. Not just that, the next version of the application will have the rating for each video shown in the list view. So how about exercising your right to vote the next time you’re on Graboid? It’s bound to make everyone happier (not just me).

We’re getting closer to the finish line. Thanks to your most helpful comments, suggestions, and reports, very soon we will have a new application with many improvements — these will be the first step to bringing Graboid close to your and our vision of what it can and should be. Within a short while, there will also be a new web site, with plenty of eye-candy and info to whet appetites for our launch.

In case you missed the link last time around and are curious about just what is going into the next release of Graboid, click here for an update.

As we get more and more great feedback on how much people love Graboid, we’re starting to implement plans to promote feature-length video content that we believe more people should know about. If you would like to submit your own work(s) to us for promotion, please send us an email. Until we automate this process, we will send you instructions on how to post your content, and we’ll contact you directly to arrange for promotion via our website or the Graboid application, if we deem it suitable.

This isn’t a commercial channel for content providers. Graboid charges for bandwidth, not content. However, we’d like to offer owners of copyrighted works the promotional opportunities inherent in Graboid.

If you’ve developed a movie or tv series that you’d like to promote, or you know someone who has, get in touch with us.