ICraveTV II - Canadian showdown

typecast writes "It's taken nearly 10 months, but this story says JumpTV is finally just some not-so-short hearings away from what could be an entirely legal (in Canada) version of iCraveTV. But the company says it probably won't wait for the hearings to end to begin Webcasting off-the-air TV signals live on the Net ... using its technology to reduce that iCraveTV-like "leakage" into the U.S. If JumpTV's border control technology can keep the MPAA out, could it keep French Nazi hunters away from Yahoo!'s servers?"

Comments

Re:JumpTV link - RM vs. WM

[iainl]

If I remember correctly, the increasing popularity of Windows Media format over Real Media is mainly down to two things:

1) Cost. Real charge a lot more for the server licenses and encoders than Microsoft do; not surprising as every .wm file out there is an implicit advert for the joys of switching to Windows rather than Mac or whichever flavour of *nix you might want.

2) Quality. Given the option, I choose .wm over .rm every download, as to my eye the .wm looks better for the given file size. Its crisper but blockier, so I can see some would disagree, but then everything is going to be a matter of personal judgement to some extent.

Also, the general nightmare of getting Realplayer and Realjukebox to not gobble resources and stick its spyware and taskbar rubbish off my system means that I'll take every opportunity I can to get the piece of junk off my box.

None of the currently popular formats are ideal - mpeg 1 isn't the greatest quality per byte and doesn't stream well, Real has the player problem above, WM is Windows only and Quicktime is only Windows or Mac. Since Windows is such a large share of the market I can see why some would rather forego the other platforms to avoid the other problems.

JumpTV link

[Earthling]

They have already started broadcasting several stations, which you can find here, but you need to have javascript on. And don't bother unless you're running windows, because everything is in Windows Media format.

Speaking of which, can someone please explain to me the reasons for the popularity of that format? I mean, not that I particularly like Real Media, but at least it's running on more than one freaking platform.

-Earthling