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Internet Televison Content Coming of Age
Thomas Hawk writes "The Washington Post has an article out this morning on the assortment of internet based TV choices that are popping up providing additional and competing content to the major studios. Most of these providers are operating more as content collectors or aggregators than actual content producers."
I'll be able to watch all my favorite shows in 320x240
I think DaveTV will have the advantage, mainly because of the lack of additional hardware needed.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I watched all 4 US presidential debates (1 vice presidential) live on CSPAN.org. It worked great.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Red vs. blue and Homestar are all the TV the internet needs.
A good use for my WebTv ;)
Based on what I see day to day on the internet it should Wor:k Gre:at.
Sometimes you just want to see the show you want, when you want to. I'm actually surprised it took so long for it to come about. But now that on-demand television is getting popular, on-demand TV from your computer is the next logical step.
I think it is way too early for something like this, most people don't have broadband, or dialup for that matter. A tv could be found for 20 bucks at a flea market that gets content for free.
I won't pay for anything, yes I am that cheap. We should let this kind of technology mature slowly rather than push it (or force it like HDTV).
1) Create radio station
2) Distribute content over internet or via CD-ROM
3) Take advantage of LPFM by running the station from hundreds/thousands of different nodes - all broadcasting under low power rules, yet dense enough to provide good coverage.
Could be something cool to do with all that old hardware, no? You'd have to come up with some pretty good synchronization software but this would be ClearChannel's worst nightmare...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I believe we are experiencing the last dying gasps of the final generation of TV as we know it... personally i have found myself watching all my TV on my computer, from downloaded Simpsons episodes to streaming CNN newscasts. I havent owned a TV in years. Most the younger people i know (18-25) are pretty much headed towards the same direction.
~slashdot are my only freinds ):
I haven't tried in a while, but NASA used to stream the live coverage of missions.
I find myself watching more and more stuff obtained from the net. My latest find is this movie on archive.org
e ction=opensource_movies&collectionid=Ironstayn_vs_ Supergovernment/
http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?coll
You can get most popular shows via BitTorrent. Check out this great site for a listing. And check out Azureus if you're looking for a great client!
Ill believe it when I start hearing more about it and not from some guys personal belief that its coming of age. Not newsworthy IMO
After skimming the article it seems like these are more like on demand content services rather than other "Internet TV" providers.
Why is there no war history channel? I know shows like World at War and Band of Brothers were a huge draw for me on the History Channel, and I'm sure the same is true for many other folks. It could easily survive in the specialty channel pool.
i have watched college sports through the internet media solution and to tell you the truth it isnt too bad. the resolution is only 640X480 but its still 'ok' considering. so far no glitches or hiccups, let's hope they can continue to offer such great service and eventually make it even better. if you get ESPN GAMEPLAN that have the most offerings for internet sports games if you are into that.
It is just a matter of time before Vonage style services for television start appearing. TV over IP.
Now is the time for Multicast...
I think it would be cool to have an opensource set top box that pulls content from something like bittorrent. Each box could serve and play, as an appliance. Let people publish content on the network and wala, true television revolution.
Could make them out of Tivo units, after replacing Linux with NetBSD.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
For me, the joy (if you can call it that) of tv has always been that it's a somewhat passive experience. Sometimes you just want to sit back and not "search" for content. Of course, lately tv has been failing to provide this experience. The lack of quality programming means that I spend more time channel surfing than I would like.
Anyway, I think there's a big potential for tcp/ip video to replace the current distribution methods. The only hurdle is replicating that passive viewing experience. I think things like RSS go a long way towards achieving this. Instead of surfing/searching for video, by tying it to RSS you could just subscribe to "channels" and have the content pulled down to your machine (or links to it) almost immediately after it's published. Tie this in with some sort of search engine or recommendation system and you have a pretty powerful product.
I don't really know that many of these new start-ups have any chance for success. The major networks and cable systems have such a strangle hold on the content it doesn't leave much for smaller 3rd parties.
I think the only room left in "internet tv" is niche programming, a la, internet radio.
But how long until I can watch TV on my cell phone? Ipods and PVPs are great, but I'd love to be able to catch up on sports news or watch a show or two during my morning commute. Can u feel me?
Free Desk
A similar service has been available in London (not sure about the rest of the uk) for several years http://www.homechoice.co.uk/ homechoice offers TV, movies etc on demand as well as 512 or 1mb broadband for about £20-30/month - us$30-45 month. It also offers movies and sport from the UKs biggest satellite tv network Sky.
I find it highly amusing that old technology is used to support new technology which is then used to supply the features of old technologies. Case 1, telephones. POTS lines are used to carry modem traffic which is now used to carry voip (i.e. telephone) traffic. Cable lines are used to carry ip traffic which is now being utilized to receive tv. Gotta luv it.
I don't see internet tv replacing regular tv, because you'd have to have all these micro-subscriptions to keep the sites afloat. Advertising just doesn't do that (Think late 90's).
I really like the Video On Demand that I get from Time Warner. I can pull up episodes from just about any popular tv show. I like the G4TechTV on demand channel a lot, as well as the comedy central one. Since I have HBO and Cinemax, I can pull up any recent movies on demand from it. The cable company already has a massive fiber and copper network, and they're finally leveraging it to provide entertainment to me!
I even have a channel (999) that let's me play GAMES on the DVR/cable box with my remote like solitaire and keeps real time stats with other people playing as well.
Digital cable and VoD is the future, not internet tv, as in streaming real media or wmv or something like that. I'd rather have my relatively uncompressed(mpeg2) content from my cable company.
Not to be overly pedantic, but the subject of this discussion is Internet Televison Content Coming of Age... should it not be Televis_I_on?
Regards,
L. Ed. C.
(Slashdot ID TheScienceKid)
We're still in the infancy of the Network Age. It's fairly easy right now for programs to operate on text (including html/xml/et al), but operating on audio or video streams isn't done much yet. Gooogle News, for instance, uses algorithmic control to 'watch' the web for interesting stories. I suppose there are certain segments of the web that do that for video, but most video editing and selection is done by people.
It won't be long (a few years, maybe) before good audio is generated in real time from scripts. You'll feed in the text of a script, select good voices and such, and stream realistic audio programs.
How to do video is something else. Animations currently take a lot of work to develop. Someday maybe they can be script-generated on the fly too.
In 15 years (following Moore's Law) everything will be 1024 times faster than it is now, 1024 times more powerful. What will that bring? It'll be fun to watch.
sigs, as if you care.
I personally welcome the idea of "TV Over IP" type providers. I'd love it if I could watch the shows I want WHEN I want, streamed or downloadable.
I'd like to think the geek crowd is also tired of having nothing but info-mercials to watch while finding the latest logic error in $openSourceProject.
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
For a list of worldwide stations - Smart Digital Network
America Free TV
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
4) ???
5) Profit!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
With my new choices, I will be downl0ad lots of different internets and chann3ls.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Please dont call me an idiot haha. I'm curious what Red vs. Blue is. I am aware of Homestarrunner, but I've never heard of Red v. Blue, If someone could let me know what it is, how I can check it out, I'd appreciate it.
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
These attempts are coming at a bit of a tough time.. HDTV services are growing pretty quickly, raising the bar for quality expectations from TV viewers.
Most of the downloadable / streamable TV content I have seen is pretty much garbage quality-wise.
I don't think they need to do full 720p or 1080i to be competitive, but they certainly need to do better than the smudgey thumbnail videos I have seen.
Maybe taking an HDTV source (where available) then scaling it down to DVD resolutions (720x480) and using MPEG-4 compression could offer a good compromise between quality and size.
It could be called "Music TV".
I personally dont want TV on Demand. Part of what made Sunday night alias was the anticipation of the next episode. With TV on demand, I could (probably would) rush through the whole season in a day or two. I dont think that would generate near as much excitement from a fan base, and the Producer proabably wouldnt get as much money either.
I would be interested in seeing sports whenever I wanted, but that can already be done with TiVo.
On demand TV would make good content seem less. Every program that I demand can be watched instantly. When I'm done watching those programs, what else is there to watch? all the shows that I didn't demand...so then I'm settling for a chunk of second rate entertainment. which probably wont be fulfilling after I just had the best.
Here is an example. I can sit down to watch show "A" which I enjoy, show "C" is also one of my favorite shows. I might sit through show "B" while I wait for show "C". If I could watch show "A" then "C" right after, I would not go back and watch show "B".
After looking through the WWW sites for Akimbo and DaveTV, I see a distinct lack of mainstream TV.
Since buying an HDTV tuner, and hooking a small antenna to it, I can get all my local stations for free - in a quality leaps and bounds better than what cable or satellite provides. So, there are only a few things keeping me paying those high monthly fees.
- The Daily Show with John Stewart. This could be easily done via Internet TV. I would gladly pay a few bucks a week/month to just get this and not all the other garbage on cable.
- Occasionally, I like to be able to get CNN. But, for the most part I use online news sources, so this is not crucial.
- Sports Programming. ESPN carries a lot of college basketball, sunday night NFL, etc. This would not necessarily transfer over to Internet TV well, because I don't want to request download & see it after the fact.. I want to see it live. Also, when you consider their push into HDTV services.. this is very hard to replicate via Internet. I don't know if this is enough to keep me paying $60++ per month. But, I would be very tempted when my college was being carried on an ESPN-HD game.
- HD movie channels. These are nice to have.. but, DVD's are an acceptable substitute. In a few years, we will have HD-DVD's, decreasing the appeal of HD movie channels.
At this point, I think that if I had the ability to access the few mainstream cable programs I want at a reasonable cost, I would dump cable TV.
I am probably being really dense, but can someone please explain to me why the major broadcast networks are not streaming their broadcasts on the Internet?
I can kind of understand why cable only networks might not (not really), but why in the world broadcast networks are not doing it is a mystery to me.
I would think it would only improve the competive position against the cable networks, and the increase their viewership, and thereby increasing their value to their advertisers.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
These sites also offer some television content but mostly old stuff (very old). They have streaming movies which does not require you to download onto a set top device and then view on your tv. The sites are http://www.cinemanow.com/ http://www.movieflix.com/ and http://www.ifilm.com/. They have free and subscription content.
is great for news. But what about action/adventure shows? When can I see Buffy kicking vampire butt on InternetTV? When can I see Jack Bower stopping yet another terrorist plot in 24 hours? Until InternetTV has stuff like that, it can't replace regular TV.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Microsoft's MCE2005 launch this month is what's fueling all of the new press. I'm currently involved in bringing the adult market to this device, but I wasn't sure the bandwidth was there to be really effective until the other day when I saw the slashdot article about Verizon's FTTP at 15Mbps.
I can stream 3 movies at full HDTV quality at that bitrate! I wasn't quite sold on the idea for the immediate future (was designing the system for thinking couple years ahead) but now it looks like anyone that's willing to spend the $1000 it takes to get one of these Windows machines, you'll be able to do serious Internet TV by mid-next year.
I'm not looking forward to rebooting my TV everyday again, however.
I created several text files with
wwiTV is a great site for live TV streams.
^^vv<><>BA
Comcast in my area provides a medicore on demand service... i'd like yours instead.
If this were done over the net then i could just cancel my comcast tv subscription and sign onto time warner. But today time warner would have to invest tens of thousands to bring that service to my tv and they probably wouldn't do it.
Once we have interoperable online television then we'll be able to subscribe to channels anywhere in the world and providers will have to compete to find the best balance between ads and subscription cost - instead of the current monopoly.
Why? vison is a French word for an aquatic mammal. Televison is a "vison at a distance".
sitting on the couch i can watch all apple.com movie trailers on my fingertips. Furthermore i have imdb lookup and access to a really big movie archive over ethernet. oh, i have linksbox to surf the net and read my emails, all from the couch. i can listen to internet radio, record it, can make screenshots in movies, make bookmarks and watch (of course) DD5.1 movies with spdif output on the xbox. ;)
this is the future boys. in fact its the past, but too few people know it
http://tvtorrents.net is another good site.
Several years from now:
-You pop in your Halo3 disc into your XBOX2 and log in to XBOX live.
-You are presented with the main HALo3 welcome screen. There is info on servers which you can join for some deathmatch or CTF action. The normal stuff. There is also a news section describing the latest happenings in the Halo3 community, ie latest tournament news, latest patch info etc. .Then there is the Halo3TV section which provides info on the daily programming being broadcast on the various Halo3TV "channels". The content is being broadcast mainly as a spec stream with a little bit of video sprinkled in.
-You see that there is live coverage of the Halo3 World Championships being held in New York. You select that channel and watch a spec stream showing you the tournament action as it happens. You watch with people from all over the globe and you can chat with them a la IRC. At the end of a match, players are interviewed live and questions are fielded from the specs.
-You go back to the daily programming screen and select the machinima section. You see that the latest episode of Red vs. Blue is being shown (again as a spec stream). You watch that channel for a while.
-Next you check out the gameshow channels. Your favorite game show HaloJeopardy is on. You tune in. Tonight's lucky contestants are randomly selected from the viewing audience in real time. Players answer trivia questions to collect ammo/weapons for the final deathmatch round.
This is just an example. The console businesses of Sony and Microsoft will eventually morph to look more like media companies.
The gaming network is the media network. The game is the media platform.
I can watch NFL Sunday without
* silly beer commercials
* GM trying to tell me it's truck will get me laid more often than Ford's
* vodka being touted as one of the basic food groups
* all men being depicted as morons who do stupid things
* all women being portrayed as witty, sensual, and solely interested in the man who ( smokes this, drinks that, drives this, plays that, eats here, or takes this pill)
* The confusion that sets in when a feminine pad commercial is somehow mistakenly inserted
I'd like to see a new feature in bittorrent where you could subscribe to a specific series from a server. Then when the new episode becomes available your bittorrent client would automatically start the download. Kind of a mix between tivo and bittorrent. That way you don't have to keep monitoring suprnova or whatever waiting for whatever it is to appear. How about this for a business model: Content providers make their shows available through bittorrent, but with ads embedded. Since these torrents are the first available of the show, people who are waiting for the show would download them first. You get all the customers who want to see the show right away, and are willing to tolerance a few ads. Bittorrent statistics would accurately show how many people are out there watching the ads.
here's on I stream to my GeexBox:
:)
http://www.maniatv.com/
I watch it quite a bit actually
good stuff
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
I have found it quite interesting that Apple long ago had video in on many of its machines, but recently none do, while MediaCenters become popular. However a Film/Video major friend, and big Apple advocate quickly corrected me. Firewire is, and with recent cable providers needing to support it, well there is all the video-in you need. We got chatting and a lot started to fit in place. For example the new G5 iMacs and Cinema displays support VESA mounts, and how H.264 is going to be huge. As well as there great support for DVI. Now granted $1200 is a lot to pay for a 17" TV, Let along a lot more for the 30", but it isn't like they don't have a potential solution. iTV or iVideo sounds good to me.
The reason a particular band or singer or tv show gets a chance at stardom, or gets some exposure, has more to do with other things than just talent. For every Spice Girls or Madonna or "Friends", there are 100 people or bands or writers just as talented, who tried for success, but never made, because they did not have the connections, the luck, the good looks, or some other quality, other than talent.
The entertainment industry, thus, manufactures success by choosing one of these hundreds of wannabes, and promoting them, giving them a chance. But many of the rest were just as good.
People will watch or listen to whatever is put in front of them by the TV and music industry, at least to some degree.
Maybe what you are trying to say, which is what many people say, is that the entertainment industry acts as a filter, sampling and discarding hundreds of wannabes, and finding dozens of good ones, and selecting a few of those talented dozens and promoting them.
Point taken. However, that filtering action is no longer needed. Now, we can rely on each other as filters. Music and TV video reviews sites on the web can let us tap into the opinions of thousands of other people, which can be tahbulated and presented to us. Just like here on slashdot.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Its getting to the point of asking yourself WHY you watch broadcast TV anymore.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but you opt for the programming of those 2 links you provided over broadcast TV?
Huh?
Everything that's in English on those lists is either public access, some random college station, or music videos. Sure that's cool to check out every once in awhile, and I agree this is the future of TV - but THAT's your replacement for network TV?
Horray for free information.. but you gotta be kidding me.
-Fatty
Some of the Norwegean tv cannels have been streaming their shows on the net for a long while now.. Exept for using them to review certain shows I never gave it much attension.. Now however having moved to the other part of the globe it is Oh so refreshing to watch a lokal show again... This doesn't apply to you amarikans anyways, as you litter the world with your.. hmm.. Quality shows :D
I happily welcome TVoIP (Does that read like twoip?)
Akimbo Systems, which two weeks ago launched
I think that should be "two days ago". Any Akimbo subscribers out there who were downloading video before this Monday (10/25)?
It's not exactly on-demand, either; you have to download each show from the Internet to the Akimbo box before you can watch it.
Huh? You "demand" a show, and it downloads across the Internt to you set-top Akimbo box. Sounds like on-demand to me.
Shows are copy-protected, so you can't ...
While the author is factually correct, it really ought to be said that a subscriber can play from the Akimbo Player to a VCR which is recording the signal. Lack of ability to move files from the Akimbo hard drive to somewhere else is germane, but small potatoes.
Tell me again, who knew Mary was a virgin, and how did they know?