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ABC Launches Full Episode Streaming
Cjattwood writes "ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ads and commercials. It works pretty well so far, although no Linux support yet as it requires Flash 8." The first episode of Lost on there is a clip show. You can skip around to a segment of the show, but are forced through a commercial before you play. The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video.
... When IS linux going to get Flash 8 anyway? Lack of it has been limiting my web-browsing ability for a little while now. Just curious. I saw this earlier today and really wanted to try it out. :-/
damned... only viewers from the United States can watch those episodes :(
Only US viewers are allowed to watch... tsk tsk tsk.
From the site: Back to the high-def rips, sans commercials, of the shows for those who follow them...
Trolling is a art,
"Only viewers within the United States can watch these full length episodes."
Or anyone with a list of US-based proxies, heh.
Oh no... it's the future.
With ad is? Or did the submitter mean "ads", as in more than one ad? We live in a world where text is becoming more and more ubiquitous... why are people so lazy about it?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
As to when someone will whip out an app to record these streams (perhaps even under Linux)?
Shame they are so low res though... no doubt many will continue to use illicit means to see the shows in a much higher res.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Only IPs from the United States can watch these movies. I actually pay for ABC on my TV, and I can't watch these. Doesn't anyone think of the canucks???? :P
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
I am assuming this is a putdown on Flash video, being Slashdot and all. The ABC site is dragging ass, so I can't actually see the quality for myself. That being said...
Flash video can encode as high a quality as any other encoder. Some of the stuff I have seen looks better than other encoders, and always results in amazingly small file size. Just this morning, I saw a 4 minute, 720x480 AVI go from 890MB to 15MB with virtually no loss in quality.
If the quality is poor, blame the developer, not the tool.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
I'm sure many of you have noticed that movies now get edited down to PG-13 ratings for theatres and then get bumped back to R levels on the unrated DVD releases. I wonder how long it will be before a network (Fox?) does the same thing. See our shows free on TV, or pay a little for the streaming unrated version of American Dad. Or, better yet, Trippin' the Rift.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
... you can get around that with proxies according to Digg (also here). This project is only up for at least a two-month trial period. Full screen is not possible, but there are two different sizes and the quality is excellent (not HDTV quality) on a fast Internet connection at my workplace.
Don't forget to leave feedbacks for ABC on this project! Let them know what you think of it! It is also missing two of my other TV shows (Invasion and Grey's Anatomy). So, I left a request and a positive comment for ABC via its feedback.
I wonder if there is a way to set the Flash video to fullscreen onto my TV as a video overlay? I do this with Windows' Media Players, VideoLAN Client Media Player, DVD players, etc. I don't have to set the players to fullscreen, just the video out.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One thing I would use this for is fishing through a series. There are always episodes worth watching over and over again. Before this the only ways to find them was to luck out on reruns, hope someone could nail it down with hints on a messageboard/usenet, or bittorrent/emule in hopes of finding it.
Now I can download them for free which eliminates much of the issues. It benefits the studios as they will probably release the series and shows on DVD in the future and should I want a high quality "legal" version I will know which set to buy.
As for the ads, good compromise.
Now just bring back old series that are no longer aired and only in syndication so I can hunt and peck through those.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Now, all they need is something good to watch.
Didn't Apple make a big deal about offering episodes of Lost on their iTunes Video/Music store?
I can't imagine they will be very happy with ABC direct-releasing similarly-poor-quality videos for free. I smell another frivolous lawsuit...
Lacking Flash 8 can't be that big of a deal, at least you don't have to deal with those "Shoot the duck!" ads... oh how tempting they can be....
I will forever be a student.
See this Macromedia forum post from Digg story. Unfortunately, it is after Windows and Mac OS X releases. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Is there something I'm missing or is there no full screen for these shows? There's a higher resolution image option but it doesn't go very full at all. I'm really trying to be good and not download the "other" versions of these shows but if I can't even watch the show at a decent size on my TV, these streams are near useless to me. I guess I'll just stick to my Head of the Class reruns on IN2TV. At least their full screen is bareable.
supervillians called Steve?
liqbase
ABC.com has launched their free online episode streaming service earlier today. Shows available include Lost and Alias among others, and are available to watch for free, albeit with ad's and commercials.
I've always wondered about sites like this, or YouTube, or Google Video, or any of the other seriously massive media streaming sites.
How the hell do they do it?
Seems to me like you'd have to have Bandwidth Of The Gods(tm) in order to pull it off. Multicast isn't really working on the internet proper. So how the hell does a site like this manage it? If you have thousands upon thousands of people hooking up...a lot of them at cablemodem speeds, how does the pipe deliver?
I know that these sites do, in fact have massive bandwidth. But it just seems to me that hundreds of thousands of people wanting hours of video thorough mutliple unicast would be enough to choke pretty much anything that's not on Internet2.
How the hell do they manage it? Is there some sort of Voodoo that I'm missing?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Currently, it looks like you can only see the last couple episodes to have aired. While I can understand where there might be technical reasons not to put the full up immediately (bandwidth being the most obvious one - I'd hate to be the network admin dealing with hundreds of geeks downloading all 220 episodes back to back), it seems like this would only be useful for people who are already following the show. It might be nice for current viewers who missed an episode to be able to go back and download it, but for a show like, eg, Lost, where the ongoing plot and sequence of episodes are very important, it's not a good way to attract new viewers. I realize that it's nominally better than the online solution they've already got (ie, nothing), but I don't think they're going to see much increase in viewership until they release more of the back library of episodes. The technical issues are (obviously) not insurmountable - if legions of anime-watchers can make high-quality fansubs widely available, then an organization with the deep pockets of a national TV network should be able to develop a workable file swarming application (ie, BitTorrent-esque) that still allows them to insert current commercials in to the downloads (swarm the episode content, direct download the commercials, and re-assemble on the other end, maybe?).
"Only viewers within the United States can watch these full-length episodes"
I'm being discriminated against, just because I'm in a different country! That's geographicist, that is! Can I sue?
Is anyone else surprised at how Flash has become the new standard for video distribution? Google Video, YouTube, etc all use Flash for displaying video, mainly, i think, to reach the widest segment of the population. I wonder if Macromedia itself ever predicted that Flash's wide availability would become its selling point for streaming video. I think this is a bad trend because it is hiding more and more of the content from the browser. I would have liked to see W3C specify some formats and controls for video that browsers should support. Instead, multimedia on the web is taking browsers towards just being an extra frame around a Flash frame. W3C: We all like focus on the semantic web stuff, but you gotta get with times and get multimedia standardized too. SVG is just a small step in that direction.
Put up a torrent of the shows in HD, and I'd wager most people wouldn't bother cutting out the commercials.
Digg users and I didn't see an option. I would like a way to put this fullscreen on my TV as a video overlay, but Flash doesn't allow that. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
:( Jeez louise; that'll teach me to go against the Torrent Plz crowd.
The submitted text:
"it requires Flash 8"
Cmdr Taco's value-add comment:
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
It's actually exactly what you'd expect from Flash video, because it is Flash video. That being said, what quality would you expect? I bet it differs quite a bit based on the datarate you encode it at... Perhaps he's saying it's similar in quality to YouTube or Google Video? (We only give you a hard time because we imagine that you have one of the best jobs in the world, so don't take it personally, Taco.)
For people asking about Linux versions of Flash 8 - they've had a separate team working on Flash 9 for quite a while and it's set to be released later this year (it includes significant changes for performance improvement, was in development to some extent in parallel with Flash 8) - and from what I understand as a casual obsverver they're going to release a Flash 9 player for Linux and just skip 8 entirely. This is in part because it's only relativly recently that they've added dedicated Linux staff, and in part beacuse this is the fastest switch between versions (8 to 9) that I can recall, anyway.
The hope is that Linux release will be simultaneous with the Mac/Windows launch, but I don't know if anyone's commited to that yet - or if it's just idle hope.
Sure its Windows only. Sure its US only. But it works for the target population.
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
When I try to stream, I get a message that I may have problems because my bandwidth appears to be below 500kbps.
That's news to me, and would probably be news to Comcast. And considering the last torrent I downloaded (last night) came in at closer to 500KBps(4000kbps), I'd be willing to make a bet whose bandwidth is less than 500kbps.
Albuquerque PC
... then watch Alias. Marshall rocks as a computer/technical geek and is funny. :) He even uses Linux, KDE, XMMS, and xmame in the show as shown here and here (screen captures!). ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Hm. Nobody's mentioned this yet, but the flash format enables them to put interactive ads into the episodes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more likely to respond to an ad if I can click on things & choose what extra information I want instead of having an ad lecture at me... When things are interactive I find I invariably spend more time playing with them, too :-)
Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...
You know, I used to think the exact same thing. Then I started going to digg frequently. My opinion changed after seeing how many factually false or misleading articles get voted up. This is also combined with rather childish typos. I'm not saying the editors are much better... but it does pay to have someone sitting there to take a step back and judge the quality of the submission.
Then again, I run my own digg clone link-aggregator... so I obviously believe in the model
People wouldn't be so adverse to the commercials if they weren't so god damn annoying.. and depressing, and all of those commercials that try to make the viewer feel guilty about something ie. Losing your hair you sad old man? too much fat around your waist fatso?? can't get your penis standing tall??? all the anti-smoking ads showing old and dying people talking like robots, drunk driving ads to make you feel ashamed about havin a little fun, anti-drug ads to make parents feel guilty about their teenage sons smoking some pot (you're an irresponsible parent! gimme a break eh)...
..
then all those god damn pharma-ads with warnings about the side-effects that cause erectile dysfunction/bladder control issues/possibility of stroke and heart attack.. nursing mothers shouldn't inhale this stuff/etc etc
TV is a fucking mess lol.
Try this for a commercial you network bitches, I might even watch it.
"Hi, I'm Jake and I'd like you to try our new shampoo. it works well and controls dandruff" -> camera closeup on shampoo bottle.
End of commercial. thank you very fucking much.
Yep, story voting killed slashdot. Rusty must be proud with Kuro5hin reigning king. Wait, no.. Didn't quiet happen that way, and digg is no different.
You know what else was on digg? A bunch of really badly written unimportant crap people rush to post so they can become popular. Slashdot fails similarly, but that doesn't excuse digg.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Is this a trial period? Or did I miss the disclaimer?
j^2
Doesn't anyone think of the canucks????
No. No one thinks of Canada, positively or negatively. And, I suspect that is what pisses you off and gives you that inferiority complex.
That said, I really miss Hockey Night in Canada & Don Cherry and a dollar buys a lot of entertainment in a Canadian strip bars.
So when is Fox going to get with it? There seems to be a hill or something between me and the local Fox station, and I'm not going to get cable just to watch the Simpsons.
There are two major components that make ABC's video offering possible:
1) Adobe Flash Media Server, aka FMS. Streams Flash movies over HTTP, but does so in a "smart" manner so that video degrades based on the performance of the client and of the pipe.
2) Akamai, which hosts thousands of geographically dispersed servers across the world. Akamai licenses Flash Media Server and hosts it on thousands of "edge" servers, which basically cache the most popular videos and stream them out from the most efficient location.
However, Google Video and YouTube do not use FMS. Since it's not their content, they don't care about its reliability quite so much. They simply package up a video inside a Flash file and serve it directly to users. If the user doesn't have the bandwidth, the video hangs or other bad things happen. I am pretty sure Google Video and YouTube also do geographic clustering (co-location) in order to reduce lag abd bandwidth costs, but I'm not sure on the details of that.
Getting back to ABC, there are two differences between their business and Google's: 1) ABC takes the user experience much more seriously (since it's their content), and 2) ABC isn't a technology company. Therefore they'll pay a little extra for the reliability and quality of FMS, and they sign up for Akamai's services because they don't have their own server farms.
my blog
"The quality is approximately what you would expect from flash video."
That's actually very misleading. Flash 8 includes a new codec which is considered among the best for online video streaming (and video in general): On2's VP6. It's a fully featured decoder also with deringing, deblocking and so on filters that enhance the quality of the decoded image.
If the quality is crappy it was a deliberate choice of ABC to keep the bitrate low for whatever reasons, or using bad encoders (which I doubt, but how can I know).
If there's one thing, Flash doesn't have a native full screen mode, which for a streaming TV show is kinda a bummer...
Hm? Maybe your monitor has a chip in it that forces you to watch it while commercials are playing, but the rest of us use that time to make a sandwich or take a dump like when we're watching on the ol' tube.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
It just takes one anal retentive person to rip the commercials and then make it available for download. The fear of DIGITALLY PERFECT HD copies will keep it limited to a crappy flash version until they can protect against that.
They don't need to force anyone to watch commercials. They could release un-DRM'ed hi-res torrents and just like with TV, most viewers would simply watch the whole thing, including commercials. Several release groups would strip the commercials within hours, but why take the risk of downloading a sloppily edited version when you can get the official one?
It works on linux just fine, I just watched a bit of this week's episode of Alias. Install wine, install the windows version firefox under wine, and then install the flash 8.5 beta also under wine. It runs perfectly after that.
501 Not Implemented
Wow. Smooth, fast, works on OSX, little to complain about.
Beats Google video by a mile. Well done.
This is hands down the best no-direct-cost online video experience to date.
Maybe now I can comprehend Lost, which I didn't find out about until it was too late to backfill.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I was excited when I first heard about this. I have heard great things about Lost and have wanted to start watching. Of course, being a netflix subscribe I completely reject the idea of starting a TV show in the middle. I was hoping that this would mean that I could watch Lost from episode 1 onwards. I don't mind sitting through commercials, I just want to see the story in order. Perhaps I am simply missing the right button, but as far as I can tell I can only watch last weeks episode.
WTF is wrong with these networking people? I WANT to watch their shows complete with commercials. The only demand I make is that I watch the show in order when I want to watch it. I don't have any intention of starting a story half way through, nor do I want to plan my life around the schedule of the TV.
The capacity to do this already exists. If I wanted to I could go to the pirate's bay right now and find exactly what I want and then some. I simply fail to see what is gained by making piracy the only way to watch a TV show on your own schedule. If they simply let people watch their damn TV shows, complete with ads, I imagine the number of people watching would skyrocket as people like me who otherwise would not be bothered to live by a TVs schedule start watching.
What sort of bone headed idiocy is preventing this from happening? Is it really fear of piracy? Do they fail to see that the piracy already exists and that failing to offer their own commercial filled version is NOT going to make the piracy go away?
I swear it almost seems like they want for controls sake, not because of any rational reason behind withholding making their content available.
PONIES!!!!!111one
What the hell is that supposed to mean? The summary could have at least mentioned the codec used or the bit rate.
Hmmm... Pie...
The rips I find on p2p's seem to be edited pretty well actually :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
...no-DRM with the DVD.
You're kidding, right? DVD was the first widely used format with built-in DRM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Restrictions Weak DRM, perhaps, but it's there.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Smart, yes,; but way too late. TV station could have been generating finds from advertising dollars for years now by allowing streaming. The future of TV is streaming television. It's too bad that marketing execs think they can strong arm their customers while new technologies out wit them at every turn. When will they learn?
Aw, count me out then - I can handle one or the other, but not both!
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The blue stripes on the progress bar tell you where the commercials are. The others are at 15:25, 24:15 (in a 43 minute program, and you aren't goosed with another one at the end!). You can seek anywhere that's been "unlocked."
Having to click "resume show" after every commercial is a feature I'd like to see "LOST." By clicking in unlocked sections, you can watch all 3 commercials in succession , then have an uninterrupted show.
You aren't forced to sit through more than 30 seconds of an ad if it runs over.
Compared to the 7-min-on, 3-off network standard, it's kind of pleasant. And seeking *works*, seamlessly, in contrast to what I've come to expect with flash video.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Forget the DRM, do ratio enforcement where you pay, say, 50 cents for every 350M. (i.e. 50 cents per ep). There are plenty of solutions nowadays for setting up a tracker that restricts a person's access if they leech too much, simply add the ability to buy bandwidth and you have a commercial solution that has all of the advantages of BT but lets you make a profit.
Give people credit for uploading, essentially paying others for hosting your content by giving them credit towards further downloads. Maybe 50 cents per 350M down and 10 cents per 350M up.
Yes, people can in theory still copy and pirate the video, but if it's reasonably priced, easy to get, and CONSISTENT (so that someone can, for example, set up automatic downloading of new episodes) and people will pay for it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Funny how the RIAA goes out to prosecute people, but they aren't up on telling people how to donate to their favorite bands or telling bands how to do donation campaigns. Talk about racketeering.
It's just that you made a flippant comment. It would have been the same if you had said "Me Too!" like some...
The device/application(s) is (are) called:
BetaMAX
VCR
TiVO
DVR
MythTV
BeyondTV
...
GBPVR
These are free shows that are broadcast throughout the world unencrypted, why would you want to record the Flash version? This is getting ridiculous. Only on slashdot do you read about people who steal free shit.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Digg's fine for getting news, but the quality of comments does not rise much above stupid 14 year old.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
Put up a torrent of the shows in HD, and I'd wager most people wouldn't bother buying the DVD. TV/movie producers are way too used to getting money once from the networks/cinemas, twice from the consumers for a permanent copy. They've still hoping to cripple Sony vs Betamax by legislating DRM and using that, protected by the DMCA, to limit home video libraries to a minimum.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The people I know that down load current TV torrents tell me there's NEVER commercials. Take a look sometime, I bet you won't find one.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The decentralization of media continues. I guess Kruschev was right (but he was about fifty years too early).
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
A contraction is a word (or set of numbers) in which one or more letters (or numbers) have been omitted. The apostrophe shows this omission.
so long as you mention the words "RIM" and "Blackberry" somewhere in your complaint :-)
Is anyone else surprised at how Flash has become the new standard for video distribution?
For ten years MS, Apple and Real have been fighting to make their proprietary streaming solutions the default for the internet. They have failed and I'm glad.
I'm no fan of Flash, but I'm sick to death of having to have all three of these media players installed. I'm sick of having to update them all time. I'm sick of browser plugins that don't work. I'm sick of content that will only work with WMP on Windows. I'm sick of having to "choose a player" when I visit a site, asking my connection speed, asking me to register for premium content and on and on.
And I'm not alone. You're average user doesn't want to and often doesn't know how to download, update and install this stuff. They don't know what number to type when it asks them about connection speed. Content providers are sick of it, too. They are inundated with constant complaints and support emails from people who can't see the video. So, the said "screw you Apple, screw you MS, screw you Real, were gonna use Flash".
And the kids love it. They type "YouTube" into Yahoo search and click the Play button on their favorite video. No fuss. No muss. Nothing to download. Instant gratification. The kids don't give two shits about the quality. It's simple and it works.
That's why Flash is the new standard in video streaming.
It's easy. 1) install Wine 2) install Windows 32 Firefox via Wine 3) install Flash 8 and Java plugins via Win32 Firefox. Hell, install Shockwave while you're at it, too. Watch the ABC Stream. If you're outside the U.S., simply go through a U.S. Proxy (see other posts on this thread or do a quick Google search). So, Linux users outside the U.S., like me, can access these streams. Enjoy! Quash
the bottom line for any kind of internet content is MONEY>> advertising has to get in.. I hope they do.. we can watch the episodes whenever we want.. nothing is free.. assumed free till someone gets caught/fined/f****d for life
than the rabbit ears on sunday night in New Haven, CT seriously.. i dont want cable ( i live rarely at my place ) and only free channels over air s**k like crazy... this is much better I hope sponsors keep paying ;-)
The episodes are only availeable for US isp's.
Will still go to p-bay for free no commercial versions...
try { println( SigString ); } catch( Exception e ) { println( 'Who cares?' ); }
I noticed that in the 24 season with the bioweapon when Jack and Chase went to see the guy in Jail the scanner was running KDE as well.
Anyone have a screen capture?
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
What do you mean "fear of"? You make it sound as though people can't already obtain perfect (to the human eye) copies of TV shows immediately after they've aired.
The thing is that even if someone did rip out the commercials, most people would still get the TV station's version of it because it is probably going to be out sooner, be a faster download (assuming the TV station sets up some fast seeding servers), and be the "best known" place to get the shows from.
Additionally, show producers should be charging companies heaps of money to have their products included in the shows.
People act as though TV downloading is going to be so different from broadcasting, but it's not. Anyone can "save" (record) a broadcast and then "cut out the ads"... and currently they do this and put it on the internet. The only reason they cut out the ads is because they had to convert the show anyway, so it's something they "might as well do, while they're at it". I'll bet that if the shows were just being offered in a convenient manner, and in a non-DRM, high quality format, no one would bother re-distributing them anymore.
Yes, there's never commercials, but only because cutting out the commercials is trivial when they are already having to record and encode the show. If the official way of getting the show was faster (good servers) and easier (no wait, convenient non-DRM format), then no one would bother cutting out the commercials and re-releasing it.
OK. I don't even watch these shows. Maybe they're OK. But, now the Today Show, with the execrable Katie Curric is streaming to the web. I could be wrong, but won't large numbers of stream customers degrade quality for the rest of us who just want to use the web to, say, read the NYT or some interesting BLOG? I'm very sensitive to the effect my web use has on others who RF-share my T1 line. If someone on this T1 starts watching commercial TV on it, quality goes to hell. Maybe there really IS a reason to start charging for use of the web.
I have been asking this for years, ever since they nerfved icravetv.com (which was great to watch Star Trek, while IMing people, and doing homework. Now I can justify connecting my computer to my TV!
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.