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Live Streaming Network TV Online - in Canada
ecampbel writes "News.com is running a story about a company called iCraveTV.com offering live streaming network TV feeds for Canadian Internet users (an area code is required to view the streams). Most of the stations offered are Canadian, but a few Buffalo, NY stations are offered as well. This is obviously the logical conclusion of streaming media, and is scaring the pants off the local network affiliates."
Now that I'm back in Newfoundland (sadly), I don't get Global, but get most of my TV from the Comedy Network (American: Dennis Miller Live, John Stewart, Ben Stein, WKRP(!!), Canadian: Tom Green, Kevin Spencer ("he's a chain smoking, alcoholic, sociopath"), Butch Patterson: Private Dick ("Give me another drink or I'll slap you around like my prison lover"), Mike Bullard) and Teletoon (who, unfortunately, do not play "Late Night Anime" anymore, but still play Duckman, Spawn every Halloween, and the Canadian "Ned's Newt" (with jokes like, "Who's the man who's a machine to all the chicks" (It *is* a kid's show after all, they had to clean up that reference), and "That's brilliant, you're way too smart for the army, you're fired") and, of course, Splat!).
Wow, I've got to give up with those damn parenthesis, I've been programming a little too long.
I guess I'll go watch Win Ben Stein's Money, now...
I think that this is a good step ahead for people to be able to acess things like TV for free (witch it should be anyways). My only major worry about this is what limits that the CRTC will eventually put to this. We know how involved governments get into things that they shouldn't be involved in. And what about Telcos getting into the TV battle. Eventually NBTel is getting into the TV way of business by sending TV over the phone line. Chech out ImagicTV for more information on that.
New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System
Downloads Real-Time TV Programs,
Displays Them On Monitor
The highly touted "Internet Revolution" took
another major step forward Monday, when Compaq unveiled the
breakthrough Compaq Presario 6000, a $4,995 multimedia
computer system that enables users to download files containing
network-television programs and display them on a computer
monitor.
"Imagine watching TV at the click of a mouse, instead of a
remote control," Compaq director of product development Bill
Welborne said. "With the Compaq Presario 6000 and a few
reasonably priced add-ons, you'll never have to watch TV on a
television again."
Who am I? Subscribe and find out
Kudos to iCraveTV.com for this most excellent site.
Do they have uncensored news reports?
How about full frontal nudity on broadcast?
I can't think of anything else that would be
worthwhile to watch.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Very useful. BTW, add 613 on there for Ottawa's area code.
:)
Hrm... I have realplayer in my netscape prefs, or 'realplay' anyway- whats the variable to pass the file labelled as?
Come on all you netscape 4.7 linux users.... someone look in your application prefs.
You'll eat it and you'll like it.
Where I live we get a whole range of Canadian stations on cable (BCTV (Vancouver), ITV (Edmonton), CTV (Toronto), and NTV (Newfoundland)): what's nice about that is because of the wide timezone spread (-3:30 to -8:00 from GMT) we have the ability to watch Star Trek (or B5 for you Babylonians) at virtually any hour of the day...
--
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
The site requires area codes to watch from east to west candaian area codes are:
506 418 819 450 514 705 807 204 306 403 780 250 604 403
Someone should invent something that would transform these signals to analouge and then transmit them using a wireless mechanism and RF Modulation.
Then cheap, monitor like boxes could be built with the wireless networking gear built into them, and the cost of the service to consumers could be paid for by advertising.
Of course, we might have a problem with competing standards - maybe the W3C could come up with something..
Hmmm... I might just seek some VC finance..
Hmmmm... now wait a moment.. I remember something like that from back when I was young..
;-)
Their security sucks big time!
:)
Goto their page: http://www.iCraveTV.com/tv/watch.html
Click on a link. Look at the url, should look like this:
http://www.iCraveTV.com/tv/c1.php3 ?u=T41ciii.ram
Change that to:
http://www.iCraveTV.com/tv/T41ciii.ram
Voila! Live TV
The only advantage I see here is the ability to pull in foreign networks, and the vast majority of people simply aren't going to be interested in that. If people (like me) really want to watch TV feeds on their computers, they're going to spend the ~$100 bucks and buy a TV Tuner. Think about it...the full range of channels, a scaleable image without loss, no intermittent feed interruptions, and you're not wasting any bandwidth. I just can't see the mass market appeal here...
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Is that all you yanks can now see how awesome Hockey Night in Canada (on CBC) really is.
Tune in at 7:00 eastern on Saturday night for the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Pittsburgh Penguins from Toronto, and at 10:00 eastern for the Vancouver Canucks at the Edmonton Oilers.
Like the t-shirt says: Hockey is Life.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Multicasting utilizes IGMP to setup a 'broadcast' that is limited in scope. That is to say that users have to 'tune in' to the multicast by 'joining' the IGMP group. This is handled by routers that must be multicast aware, i.e. have a decent IGMP v2 implementaion. The commodity internet is not multicast enabled, but you can tunnel into the Mbone. Also for those of us fortunate enough to have access to vBNS or Abilene these networks are already multicast enabled.
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
709
Just to add another one.
NASA is using multicast on a private Internet to distribute spacecraft data to end users. This allows the use of COTS (commercial, off the shelf) networking hardware and software instead of proprietary protocols and systems. The ground station that receives spacecraft data transmits a single stream of multicast UDP packets. Multicast enabled IP routers split the single stream into multiple streams as needed. This allows efficient use of the bandwidth on the network backbone.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Excuse me my sarcasm. It's just that inspite that the bandwith is growing, the connections are getting slower - at least where I work. Getting short, simple pages from US lasts longer and longer. It's the same phenomenon that makes each new version of Windows slower in spite of more powerfull computers. Quality does not improve: only the number of gadgets. I'd rather see quick loading of a page without even pictures than a java-live-video-audio-whatever-overloaded page which takes two hours to load.
When I think about it... it's like with buying a new back-pack. You had one which had 60 liters, and it was too small. Then you buy one with 100 liters, and it's still too small - but much heavier then the first one. The same goes for cars. And apartments. And benches in a lab. And money. Woah, I think it's a hardwired feature! I wouldn't be amazed if they found it on the 22 chromosome...
Regards,
January
P.S. It's not a flame. It's a joke.
Here are some links for those of you who don't like area codes and don't like license agreements. Obviously, people from countries other than Canada are going to view these streams, regardless of anything anyone posts, so you might as well be able to do it easily:
NBC
NewVR
CBC
Global
ABC
CTV
OnTV
PBS
TVO
SRC
CTS
CFMT
WB
CITY
I must say that watching people argue on some crazy talk show in French is rather humorous.
For those of you who don't own sat dishes, here's the deal in brief: In the Good Old Days, the owner of a C-Band dish (big dish, not the little mini dishes like Primestar) could subscribe to stations like the Denver 5, and receive NBC/CBS/ABC via sat. Nice clean picture, the best you're going to get via NTSC. Also, if you lived in a time zone other than the origionating station, you gained another chance to watch your favorite show.
Then the cable cabal and the networks banded together, and managed to push the Satellite Home Viewers Act through. Now, if you are in what the FCC calls the "Grade B contour" (read: crappy, ghost-ridden image 80% of the time, nothing 20% of the time) of a local station, you are forbidden by law to receive network programming from satellite unless your local station provides you with a wavier. Yeah, and Mr. Gates will let vendors install Linux next to Win-98.
Given this, I wonder how long the networks will allow Webcasting to go on before they push for an amendment to the SHVA to cover this.
Just like Microsoft and NSI, the networks don't want to see their monopoly end, and just as assuredly, end it must due to technology.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hmm, now we'll have the TV industry wake up to the same threat the music industry is facing now. Not that the concept is not obvious (after all, at a low level everything is just a stream of 0s and 1s), but this must be a red flag in their face.
... if nothing else, this means that as an independant producer you will be able to distribute your films to anyone who's on the internet. Wether anyone will care to watch your stuff is of course an entirely different matter.
Much as we needed the recording industry over the past 50 years to press those damn CDs/Records and distribute them, we're currently relying on the TV studios and networks to make/distribute their products. Also witness the current TV climate: much as the recording industry creates their own hypes and ignores non-conventional artists, the TV (and movie) industry is falling victim of their own success. Their desire to standardize everything and make it 'safe' for (their) ideal targe audience (families with kids, etc) results in a product which excells in conformity and blandness.
Given this, advances in technology which make it possible to distribute (and eventually produce) decent quality TV programs at low costs, will lead to the proliferation of 'independant' studios. With their monopoly on creation/distribution of movies vanishing in internet time, the TV studios will eventually face the same tide the music industry is facing now: We don't really like them, we don't really need them anymore; let's move to a medium we can control and just ignore the studios. Looking at the sad state of the (currently +- 30) TV stations I get via cable, this may just be good