GoogleTV Beta

infinitesolutions
infinitesolutions is a YouTube comedy channel with 76.7K subscribers. The channel primarily features visual gags disguised as how-to tutorials. The channel first gained popularity in 2013. Some of them were very obvious. How to Recharge Batteries is an example. It showcases the host touching the positive terminals of two batteries, one empty and one full, and wraps “electrical tape” around them and claiming that the empty one is recharging. But some of them needed an understanding of computer hardware to understand that this was a hoax and joke. How to Clean Up Your iTunes Library is an example. The video showcases the host claiming that a program called Front End Convert Drop (FE Convert Drop) had a hidden feature that could clean your iTunes Library. You could do this by dropping your XML file into the tool. The host says it's advertised as a mundane file converter tool. In reality, it had no secret features. Some videos like How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta didn't contain any obvious gags or jokes. There is one curious thing. infinitesolutions will always refer to other episodes. In a phone is wrapped in an ethernet cable. (not a smartphone) That is a reference to How to Increase Your Wi-Fi Signal where the host wraps an ethernet cable around a phone (not a smartphone) and puts it in a bowl covered in foil on the inside and claims that your Wi-Fi signal should increase. The channel seemed a bit suspicious because four of its videos were uploaded on January 26, 2007.
GoogleTV Beta
GoogleTV Beta was a hoax that started in 2007. [ uploaded a video called "How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta". When How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta was uploaded it wasn't very obvious that infinitesolutions was a YouTube comedy channel. In the video the host claims that if you log into Gmail and go to Settings and then General and at the very bottom you would see a text box that says "Love Gmail? Use Gmail with these other Google Products" with Google Products being a shortcut that you had to copy, send an email to yourself with the link being in both the subject and the body and no added characters or this wouldn't work, then archive the letter, then log out, then back in again and repeat this process (He said that it took him 11 tries) until you got a rollover animation, then click on that rollover animation, and you would be in! Of course this didn't work but with his calm voice people decided to give it a try. This video blew up. The day after the video was published, it had 13,335 views but just six days after the video was published it had 228,957 views and by October it had 468,591 views! It looked very real. The people behind it created a webpage in inspect element and modified a file called "hosts" to show http://tv.google.com which wasn't a real website at the time. Google used and still uses adverts to make money. http://tv.google.com had adverts play in front of your show. Google used to and still does personalize adverts. http://tv.google.com had personalized adverts for the host. You could make it look even more real in After Effects. The people behind this had considered everything. A few things were off though. Like the spacing wasn't quite right and there were different titles in the title bar and the tab title but the title bar and the taskbar button had the same title. That not how a webpage works in Windows XP. A window was in different places in one clip. The email the host gets after "finding" GoogleTV Beta is signed by the Gmail Team. The URL the host receives after "finding" GoogleTV Beta is http://mail.google.com which is the gmail URL. But because this video is in 240p which is blurry by our standards today you can't pick up on these things if you weren't actively looking for them. And you could look in the DNS records and see that there was no TV sub-domain for google.com. If you put tv.google.com into your browser back in 2007 it would say something like: "We can't find this server". But only if you were skeptical would you try this which most people immediately weren't but after logging in and out of Gmail again and again people started to become skeptical. 2 days after How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta been brought to infinitesolutions uploaded a video called "" where he says that Google has made it harder to sign up. And he tries to prove that infinitesolutions is not a joke and How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta isn't a hoax. Now the first part doesn't make sense because Google wouldn't make harder because they'd need more beta testers to figure out problems. To prove that infinitesolutions is not a joke and How to Sign Up for GoogleTV Beta isn't a hoax he shows unedited footage without a screen recording and he shows GoogleTV still appearing. But if you look closely it looks like he is just playing a screen recording that's already edited because there is a delay between his mouse clicks and the mouse clicks happening in the recording. And at one point the username field fills out too fast for the host's typing speed. When he logs into Gmail, we see a link called "TV". That is some more HTML editing to show a link that doesn't exist and when the host clicked on the non-existent link, he was brought to the same page as he had been brought to before but this time the title bar displayed the URL of the page, https://tv.google.com . This happens when there is no <title> tag in the HTML document, so the host was definitely making it up. Now despite all of these reasons that this was a hoax Gizmodo was on the fence to whether this was a hoax or not but later they figured it out. But they managed to trick an even bigger corporation: Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft got tricked by a channel with 76.7K subscribers. One of the host's friends had a roommate that worked at Microsoft. The roommate was called to an emergency meeting to do for GoogleTV Beta because they weren't expecting this at all. So the roommate had to explain to them that this was just a prank. Google had to release a press statement stating that they weren't testing GoogleTV Beta and GoogleTV wasn't a thing.

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