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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.
It tells me to "Upgrade" to WinXP ... sounds like a downgrade to 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.
It's because of the DRM. If you go to in2tv.aol.com and try to watch a show they explicitly tell you that, before you see the link to the .avi (will verify with wget when I get home).
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.
The complicated Windows-only DRM'ed scheme surely costs more than just producing a stock mpeg, avi, or christ even a flash file. And the latter is inherently cross-platform.