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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 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 ;)
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 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 ):
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!
After skimming the article it seems like these are more like on demand content services rather than other "Internet TV" providers.
This has been disproven millions of times. The true legal broadcast power limits are measured in microvolts at a distance from the antenna. So Mr. Microphone is about the legal limit.
Also, if you start running over the legal limit, you get multipath reception issues as a receiver hears multiple transmitters on the same frequency (from adjacent cells).
Computer in car retrieves content from house via 802.11b, then content is played from cache during commute. Easy enough.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
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.
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 haven't quite decided if this is a good thing yet...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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.
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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.
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".
From a marketing perspective, now is the perfect time to bring this out. It's something new to attract more people to high-speed internet. By now, most people who don't have high-speed in areas where high-speed is readily available will probably not ever have high-speed unless there is more available through it.
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.
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.
Ok, so why aren't the local affiliates streaming their broadcasts, all we are talking about is taking the same content they broadcast freely over the airwaves, and making it available over the Internet.
This should be a no brainer.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet