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In2TV Goes Public
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like AOL has finally released In2TV, allowing us to watch some of our favorite shows on the internet. It looks fairly promising." In2TV has managed to bag four major advertisers right from the start but if you want to watch on anything but a WindowsXP machine you may be out of luck.
In2TV is also out of bounds to other alternative browser users inside XP.
Unless you use Internet explorer 6.0 and Media Player 10 you can't watch the big streams.
This obviously rules out Firefox users, so no Babylon 5 for me
You can't even use it on XP 64.
Damn good though, and so far the only thing that has tempted me to install WMP 10...
Hell, I might even use IE for it as well.
tip for Windows users who have removed their IE icon, open "My Computer" and directly enter the URL into the address bar - it converts from Explorer to Internet explorer automagically...
liqbase
Damn.. I've got boot into XP just so I can watch Brisco County Jr. I've been wanting that on DVD forever.. this will have to tide me over until they release it.
Somebody please get Steve Jobs on the horn and tell him to get the Sopranos on iTunes.
Please.
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AOL and Warner Bros. have launched In2TV, the first broadband television network, . . .
I thought BotTorrent was the first broadband television network?
It tells me to "Upgrade" to WinXP ... sounds like a downgrade to me.
after having read tfa and the source it provides for the information about "windows xp only", i don't really feel informed about any reason.
it needs media player 10. but why? because of DRM? copying / recording restrictions? soecial features, codecs? just missing interest in supporting different platforms?
i got to run drm'ed streams using cxoffice plugin in firefox/linux, any chances for me?
Who has the bandwidth to watch crappy, jerky streams?
Until they fill that worldwide "analog hole" there's no way this stuff is really going to compete. Even if the US succumbs to pervasive DRM, are they going to stop marketing shows internationally? It seems most of the torrents come from abroad anyway. I once downloaded a "West Wing" episode before it had even appeared on TV in my east coast market.
Thanks to the indie film makers there's already better stuff freely available on the internet than on most of those 500 TV channels, anyway.
I really don't want to instal Media Player 10. I had it on a system, and I just didn't like it compared to Media Player 6. I wonder what good the DRM in 10 is if people can record the video when it plays?
Sounds like a bunch of dusty re-runs from decades past. From TFA:
The shows are organized into six genre-themed channels (with two more to launch this summer), including:
- LOL TV: Laugh Out Loud with everyone's favorite comedies from Welcome Back, Kotter, which made a household name out of John Travolta to the slapstick antics of Cousin Balkai and Larry in Perfect Strangers as well as the Emmy-winning Chico and the Man, Hangin' With Mr. Cooper and Head of the Class.
- Dramarama TV: Fans will enjoy the unaired "lost" pilot of juicy soap Falcon Crest and all the drama of five-time Emmy nominated Sisters, plus there's Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Spenser: For Hire and the family favorite Eight Is Enough.
- Toon Topia TV: Kids and adults alike will flock to animated fare such as Beetlejuice, Steven Spielberg Presents Pinky and the Brain and Freakazoid, The New Adventures of Batman, and Histeria!
- Heroes and Horrors TV: Sci-Fi and Horror come together in heroic proportions with Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Babylon 5, Wonder Woman, V and Freddy's Nightmares.
- What a Rush TV: Rev up for plenty of action-adventure when East meets West in Kung Fu, plus La Femme Nikita, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Dark Justice and The Fugitive.
- Vintage TV: Fans find all-time favorites such as Growing Pains with heartthrob Kirk Cameron, F-Troop, The F.B.I., Maverick and Alice.
Here in Ireland/Britian we get shows like Scrubs, Lost, etc. months after you do. This service could become immensely popular with people in Ireland(when we get real broadband in about 20 years time) & Britian and any other English speaking language. This could cause a large negative impact to broadcasting companies like Sky because their shows will already be months outdated. I'd like to see how this pans out. I have no objection to installing Windows Media Player 10 if it stays the hell away from everything else when it's not running, and all this works over the college firewall(another massive user base).
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
I am watching B5 with Firefox now. Just install a plugin and an Active X control (gives me shivers) from AOL.
Sorry, but I consider AOL to be as evil, if not a little more than Microsoft.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
"but if you want to watch on anything but a WindowsXP machine you may be out of luck."
Why is it that only people who are at work can get to watch TV on their computers?
Any info on what resolution / quality they support. I couldnt find anything on their site. The stream speeds seem to top out at 700 kilobits.
I just fired up episodes of Pinky and the Brain and Babylon 5 and they both seemed to go fine (besides me having to switch to my Windows box and fire up IE - if you want to use Firefox on Windows (no Mac/Linux) you have to install an ActiveX plugin, which scares the living bejeezus out of me). It looks like you're watching a 30-second ad before the video; I didn't watch long enough to find out if they're inserting advertising in the middle of shows as well. The quality is actually quite good; at least VHS quality, and you can click a button to make it full screen. Some shows are advertised as having a higher quality version available, but you have to install their client that downloads in the background; it appears to use Kontiki, which I'm reluctant to install (I already have enough upstream being used between Vonage and Bittorrent without another content delivery system gumming up the works). Lastly, they seem to have a limited selection of episodes up - I'm not sure if they're planning on making all epsiodes available on demand or if they're going to rotate through episodes and only have a limited selection available.
Overall it's not going to win any awards for design - but it works, and for free I suppose I can't complain too much.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
When they offer a video *SERVICE* without forced bundling of software (eg when the video is delivered in a standard, documented format over standard, documented network protocols, in such a manner that *ANYONE* can develop software to read and play it), that might be newsworthy. This isnt.
I tried it, but the video image is too small. Does anyone know how to increase the image size? My laptop has a 15.4 inch 1920x1200 resolution display, btw. The video window is like a 1x1.5" box on my screen! arghhh
Here http://television.aol.com/in2tv
if you want to watch on anything but a WindowsXP machine
Damn. I was just about to fire up AOL on my Apple ][.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
At least they left pref("security.classID.allowByDefault", false); in the activex Extension that FF users will have to use.
Security issues aside I guess its nice that they made the effort so that Firefox users can use it.
Too bad it won't work without the UI nightmare that is WMP10. Someone post a WMP9 workaround...
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
They have not thought it through if think they can have unicast connections to half the US or World, when the final episode of the "I married a random person" reality show is on.
I guess that's where the DRM comes in. Nobody will want it, so no problem.
If AOL wants to alienate a crap load of its potential customers, then they can go right ahead. They either fix this "problem" (probably intentional) or suffer losses. People aren't going to switch operating systems just to watch some T.V. online.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I tried to view some of the content (Kung Fu) and all I got was the ads before the movie. Nothing plays after that. If you try another episode, you just get another ad served. Lame really!
keyboard not found! press any key to continue...
What's up with that? WIPO?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Me too, hence the reason I'm knee deep in ethereal right now...
Damnit, I want Pinky & The Brain!
It's probably just old recycled code, we can but hope....God I love "Pinky & The Brain"...
Okay. I tried to install their little ActiveX plugin for Firefox and it failed to work. I didn't feel so bad, though, because it barely works in IE as it is. But then I went back to browsing and discovered Firefox kept crashing. After 20 minutes of digging, I found the little POS files it put in there. I deleted them. All is good now.
And these companies wonder why things are pirated. When this thing dies a fiery death, they'll sit and scratch their heads and wonder why.
Anger.
So, I went to the link with my Mac running 10.3.9 and Safari 1.3.2 just for laughs, knowing it wouldn't work. Sure enough, it redirects me to a page telling me that I need Windows XP and WMP 10 to "experience all that this great new service has to offer."
To be expected.
But then I notice the title of the window, "AOL Television: In2TV: Upgrade." And in bold letters on, the page says "How to Upgrade" followed by a link to Microsoft's page on Windows XP.
So, I need to "upgrade" my Mac to a Windows machine to view this content? Guess who wrote this page?
The image quality isn't much to write home about. Graham http://www.grahamandgrahamphotography.com/
In the beginning, the 'net was fairly system agnostic. You could send an email from a PDP-10 running Unix to some TOPS-20 machine. And it was good.
Increasingly, it is becoming proprietary. You must have *this* OS, and *this* video player.
I fear the day when to even connect, you will need to be running Windows with some blessed DRM-safe code. "Sorry, you are not running a Secure OS. You cannot connect."
The sad thing is, few understand.
Even fewer care.
How thoughtful.
If you look into the service, you can stream the videos for free with nothing but an ActiveX plugin and Macromedia Flash. However, if you want "HighQ" video (what they claim is "DVD Quality"), you have to install a piece of software.
It's basically a BitTorrent ripoff. It's a peer-to-peer upload-as-you-download service. But since the files are stored locally and not streamed, I started poking around. Lo and behold, I found the hiding place for the WMV files!
Download a file with the service, then navigate to:
c:\Documents and Settings\~user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\*random hash*\filename.wmv
Note: You may have to do this at the command prompt, as any attemps I made to get into the "Content.IE5" folder through the GUI were futile. But take a look around, and you'll find all of the WMV files the program uses. Copy them to another directory, and there you have your DRM'd file. The first one I tried was named "PerfectStrangers_Barcode_151772C_1500.wmv~". It plays fine in the standalone WMP10, but not in BSPlayer or MPC. GSpot also doesn't recognize the file.
So there's the source file. Gentlemen, start your cracking!
You can't even use it on XP 64.
Well, I pretty much assumed that. My sister has a 64-bit machine, but we've just decided to run XP Pro on it; once we get around to getting a new hard drive in it that actually has decent size (long story why we didn't in the first place) and install an OS to take advantage of that juicy 64-bittedness, it's certainly not going to dual-boot into XP 64, it's definitely going to be some distro of Linux. I mean, does anything work on XP 64? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if people managed to find out some workaround for tricking In2TV to work on *nix before XP 64 ever gets support.
tip for Windows users who have removed their IE icon, open "My Computer" and directly enter the URL into the address bar - it converts from Explorer to Internet explorer automagically...
I'd almost think it's insulting the intelligence of
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I don't know exactly why, but 20 minutes later the file no longer works in WMP10 alone. I can guarantee that I had the file copied to the desktop, opened it, and had it playing perfectly. Now, I don't know if the software did some poisoning, or if I had some perfect combination of things open at the right time, but it now no longer plays in WMP10 alone.
Odd.
I thought the list of available shows was pretty dull until I saw that they got fuckin' Freddy's Nightmares! I was a huge Nightmare on Elm St fan and I would take all the Fredddy I could get. The first episode was really good in that it actually showed the backstory of how he came to be. Granted Freddy himself only appeared in a handful of episodes and the ones without him were pretty horrible, I'm still going to watch a couple of these for memory's sake.
And they got V too! Another Freddy/Robert England connection.
The IN2TV wikipedia article mentions those those, but I don't see them mentioned anywhere on the actual site. Anyone know if they're going to add these? I believe Pinky & the Brain, a show they already have, was part of Animaniacs.
During the Live 8 concerts last summer I had zero trouble viewing the live streams with linux (just had to click through their flash-dependent selector, use the DOM inspector to find the actual windoze media bit, and feed that to mplayer, which is a handy sequence in general). The on-demand clips were a bit trickier until I found out that they were in a format called Nullsoft Streaming Video, using the On2 VP5 codec, which xine supported at that time and probably more players since then. It also took a while to work around the broken bits of javascript in the player window, but all of the content played fine on Linux. Has anyone looked at this to see if it's similar?
Great Idea, but all i get is their adds then a blank screen. ...and this is why I went out of my way to get media player 10? Give me a break.
Nothing to see here unless you are lucky. I'd think AOL could have done better, but I guess I'm deluded again.
Well, their streaming server is running Red Hat, so, uh, yeah...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
In fact, they're using Tomcat/4.1, so their streaming is being done via servlets or something. If anyone knows where the actual direct URL's to the videos (not the URN thing), I think it'd be a good thing to post it.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I think the videos might all be DRM'd. Although, I'm not sure, since I didn't get a popup asking me if it was OK to acquire a license. The 1.5 mbps downloads are certainly DRM'd though. All the ones I'm downloading appear to expire June 1.
In case anyone cares, Nullsoft is the creator of WinAmp (recently bought out by AOL) and .NSV is theier standard streaming format for video (.PLS is their standard for music).
cents+=2;
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
The problem with these sorts of ventures is that they are run by big media. Consider some alternatives:
1. iCraveTV style: do what the cable companies did: simply rebroadcast TV signals in a different format, ie. over the internet. Benefit: where the cable companies offered better reception, iCraveTV's USP was deterritorializing TV: local TV goes global. TV for ex-pats. A fine idea for it's time; legal in Canada; killed by litigation by US networks and cable co's and NFL/NBA.
2. Democracy style: video podcasting. Benefits: standard file formats and protocols; anyone can publish videos; movies are downloaded automatically by subscription and can be saved; Bittorrent distribution; no streaming; no commercials; soon there will be millions of niche channels.
In contrast, how does big media approach it?
Hmmn. Internet. Niche publishing. Peer to peer based communication. Email. IM. Sounds a lot like radio in the 1930s! Imagine if we could broadcast radio with pictures with this thing!
Big media's approach: a few big corporations broadcasting the same old crap to passive viewers; proprietary technology; technology used not for what it can do to empower people, but for what it can do to prevent people from escaping a purely passive reception, ie. skipping commercials and saving clips. And no one - and I mean NO ONE - gets to publish but big media, and I don't care *how* cheap it is!
It's basically like the phone has been invented, and the phone company is insisting that it be used to solely for broadcasting weather reports. The biggest obstacle to the future is those with accomplishments in the past - and their lawyers. Dismal thinking, implementation, and content. Yet another dinosaur.
Well, I just did. It's similar right up to a nice bit of javascript code buried in one of the files referenced by called isDRMAsset which looks for a magic letter next to the bitrate in the mms URL, and that letter is there. And my mplayer doesn't like connecting to the mms url that results. So this is apparently MS DRM. Sigh. (The letter is either S or G depending on the bitrate, if anyone cares.)
If they used realmedia, they could offer it to every modern OS including Macintosh and Linux and still have "evil DRM" they need.
They could offer same content to mobile platforms too.
Or same goes for Quicktime which they DEVELOP the content on.
I guess another "code/invent nothing, just spread spyware lie and bribe content providers" wmedia lame dominance strategy from MSFT.
Instead of giving time to this obvious "we can't make a good player so lets offer AOL free servers so they use our format only" lame game, try this:
:)
http://www.getdemocracy.com/
At least they offer some stuff AOL/TW can't dare to air. Oh, not porn
This might be well-known but what's quite frustrating is that it's not clearly stated. The tv shows may only acquire a license through a U.S.-based Internet connection so, if you're outside the U.S. and don't have a proxy or VPN, you can't play that content. (Some previews work, though.) Using a VPN is a bit cumbersome and much slower for streaming media. The "Hi-Q" local files require a license/connection every time they're played.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/