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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 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 ;)
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!
Yeah, and with my dialup connection at home, I'll be able to watch the entire season of a show about the same time the DVD release comes out!
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 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.
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.
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 amazed to see the words "quality" and "TV" used in the same sentence.
HDTV presentation of crap is still crap.
Mind the gap...
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.