I wasn’t really surprised to note that earlier this week Michael Cowpland’s company ZIM announced they would be partnering with the Chinese company PPLive. With earnings down, and ZIMs SMS sales on the decline (a visit to their bulk SMS site mentioned that “We regret to inform you that www.zimsms.com is no longer available.
All unused credits must be used by September 30, 2006. Kindly
note that if you fail to use your credits, no refund will be issued.” It seems like another bandwagon they could try and scramble onto, much like his forray into Linux with Corel Linux when Linux was the talk of the town, an Office Suite - Corel Office, purchased from Novell, and his later jump to ZIM with SMS.

In visiting ZIM’s site (entirely flash based? yikes.), they do a fairly good job of marketing the service, but also provide a download link to the current PPLive client - and it’s really terrible. I understand that they just made the deal, but they could at least fix up the client and provide some english content before making a big announcement. The English PPLive client I downloaded was still mostly in Chinese, and was probably just as broken as any other distributed p2p video client I’ve used. Only a couple of the videos actually worked, and none of those were in english. The whole experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. It doesn’t make too much sense to me for them to announce this great partnership, and then hand out a version of a terrible P2P TV client. AOL’s Winamp Video directory does a much better job, and they weren’t making any announcements. If anything, it seemed more like a ploy to stop investors from continuing to sell all their ZIM stock. If I were them, I’d keep selling…