Infinite Solutions vs Google TV—another Lonely Girl 15?

Towards the end of January, Mark Erickson, by his own accord IT Supervisor at Energy Compliance, Inc., posted several episodes of his IT tutorial series Infinite Solutions on YouTube.

Among several practical tips for the home office crowd, one segment stuck out and became a viral hit: ‘How to Sign Up for Google Beta’ walks viewers through several fairly complicated steps to logging onto a secret Google beta service called Google TV. Its purpose: To watch cable and network television live on the Internet.

Coming from the serious young man in the video, it all seems to make sense, and legions of hungry Internet TV aficionados watched on and tried to duplicate Mark’s steps with very few if any actually succeeding.

Amidst Rumors and accusations of another hoax in the Lonely Girl 15 vein,  Mark felt compelled to post a follow-up clip in his defense, again walking viewers through the log-on procedures to Google TV beta, this time in real time and uncut.

On the heels of Google endorsing traditional television this week as the unchallenged master of video distribution, Claire Atkinson writes in AdAge today that Google categorically denies any such service exists.

"Mark Erickson's Infinite Solutions segment highlights Gmail's seemingly infinite powers -- from gobs of storage and lightning-fast search to some of the best anti-spam action in the business. Alas, Mark's 'Google TV beta' is simply a figment of his fertile imagination -- but great entertainment for all of us here at the Googleplex."

Is this indeed a brilliant hoax and someone is actually portraying the competent IT-expert?  The skillfully quirky intro to Mark’s videos, the triumphant smirk at the end of his update and the super-nerdy headshot on the homepage are almost too good to be true. After all, this IT geek manages to hack his way into Google but doesn’t bother to put up video on his own site where instead he leaves us with a ‘coming soon’ notice?