It appears when it comes to the web, Liberty Village is alive and well. Fresh off rumours that Tucows was scaling back, they've gone ahead and launched a new web video site called Butterscotch.

According to the press release, Butterscotch will offer educational and user-friendly instructional shows designed to demystify technology for the average technology consumer. The site is broken down into two sections - original weekly or bi-weekly shows and daily instructional tutorials. One of the former is a new Amber Mac vehicle (embedded above) called The A List.

Earlier today I connected with Butterscotch's Sean Carruthers who filled me in on my burning questions about the new site.

The site officially launched yesterday. How long has it been in development for?

We've had the concept in development since spring of this year, but we really started the hard work at the beginning of August of this year when we got the official go-ahead from Tucows. At that point it was Andy Walker, Amber MacArthur and myself, with Matt Harris coming onboard soon after that.

Are you guys a division of Tucows? Do you operate out of their offices in Liberty Village?

We're a division of Tucows, and currently located at their Liberty Village space, though we're currently setting up a second location to act as a studio space for our shoots.

Though it should be noted...

The whole project started out when Andy began talks with Tucows about his own personal site, Cyberwalker, which had a lot of tech content on it. The decision to head more firmly into the world of tech video came about because of our success with Lab Rats, Amber's success with CommandN, and the audience we'd built up through our work with G4TechTV Canada's shows Call For Help and The Lab With Leo Laporte -- going full on into video production seemed like the way to move forward....especially because a good chunk of the tech content available online was very very techie, and not so welcoming to the new user with an interest in tech.

How many new videos will you guys be producing on a daily or weekly basis?

We'll have new shows every day....The A-List is Amber's viral video show, and will be once a week. The Noob is a show that explains tech at a very basic level, with a bit of history thrown in, and will be every two weeks. Lab Rats will continue to be once a week. On Deck once a week.

So, it's 5 different shows plus tutorials?

Yes, hopefully up to 5 new tutorials per day.

Is it safe to say you guys are aiming this at the non-Facebook crowd?

We're definitely trying to bring them into the fold, but they're not strictly our audience - Lab Rats hits everyone from 12 to 90, and the viral video show will probably skew a bit younger. But it seems like the audience you mention has been largely underserved, so we're trying to make sure we give them content as well. Plus, we're trying to make sure we make the content appealing to women as well as men, which is part of the reason we went with "butterscotch.com" instead of a very techie-sounding name.

Tech affects everyone these days, but tech coverage hasn't always been aimed at everyone. We're hoping to change that.

Since you're owned by Tucows, I imagine you had quite a few quality domain names to choose from....why Butterscotch? Aside from the fact it's non-techie.....

Well, as you can imagine, they had a list of names that were available, and butterscotch was the name that everyone reacted to really positively. And butterscotch is a very friendly name (and a very tasty candy), which made it perfect for a site that is designed to have a more lifestyle feel.

If you had to bet, what do you think will end up being your most popular show?

Of the shows we have going right now, we're getting really good feedback to The Noob, and of course to The A-List. Lab Rats continues to get over 100,000 downloads per episode so we're setting that as the bar for all the new shows. Ultimately, it's quite possible that our most popular show will be one that we haven't launched yet. We're working on a new show about mobile, planning a show on how tech intersects with parenting, and an on-location show that will cover events like the Consumer Electronics Show.

Ultimately, I'm hoping they'll all do really well with the audiences we're crafting them for!

Are your different shows going to continue to have their own sites (like labrats.tv) or is everything been migrated to butterscotch.com?

Everything will eventually be delivered through the butterscotch site and brand, though we may have separate sites for the popular shows as well. For the time being, labrats.tv will continue on as always so people know how to find us.

Will you be having a launch party?

We're planning to - we're on beta launch status right now, so this is our shakedown cruise. We'll have our official launch early in 2009, possibly February. And we'll likely introduce a whole batch of new shows by that point too.