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Best Sites For Watching TV On Line

admin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:48:42 +0000

Although in general I might rather watch TV On The Radio than watch TV on the Internet, I still do it on occasion. The convergence of The Web and television is an idea that’s been around for ages (anybody remember Microsoft’s early feeble attempt?) but has taken a remarkably long time to catch on. My first bet was on Joost, one of the first web TV services that worked exceptionally well right out of the gate. Alas, America always makes weird choices driven by marketing rather than logic (anybody remember Betamax vs. VHS?) so one of the first pervasive services stateside was Hulu. If you really want to watch a TV show (or even full-length movies) bittorrents might be the way to go, but you have to be a bit of a nerd to figure the whole thing out, and if you want to watch the content as a stream or if you have any respect for those arcane documents that comprise copyright law, bittorrents probably aren’t for you. So back to the point: where can you watch TV on line? Below is a list of sites that actually have worthwhile content and seem to function reasonably well. If you have trouble with getting decent streams on any of these major services, check a few things before you start blaming the service. Aside from having enough RAM or a decent video card, you might try checking your firewall settings, updating your version of Flash, or get your butt off of sites like Facebook that hog system resources and bandwidth.

We already mentioned Hulu and Joost, so here are some more; let us know if we missed any good ones:

Fancast is operated by Comcast, and as a result has a fair amount of decent content. This is one of the few major sites that seems a little glitchy on my systems, both Mac & PC. Who knows, maybe they can tell I’m on AT&T DSL and choke my bandwidth?

TV.com (I wonder how much they paid for that domain?) is the CBS answer to NBC’s Hulu. Lots of popular programming including shows like Dexter, True Blood, Smallville, CSI, Lost, and Family Guy

Veoh is a great aggregator that presents content from a really wide variety of sources including CBS, ABC, MTV, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, ESPN and even YouTube.

In2TV is a partnership between AOL and Warner media that brings you a huge selection of older and more obscure programs from the 60′s and 70′s like Adam 12, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family, and much more.

Crackle brings you Sony media, both television *and film. The TV programming includes content like True Colors, Rescue Me, and Married with Children, while the full-length films include everything from Ghostbusters to Taxi Driver.

And of course you could always use pay services like Amazon’s Video on Demand, Netflix, or iTunes, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?

Innovid: Advertising You Might Actually Enjoy

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:03:45 +0000

In spite of Google’s $2 Billion purchase of YouTube, and the general public’s slowly growing awareness of services like Joost and Hulu (and soon Sling), no one has yet figured out how to effectively monetize these sites. I mean, if you want to see advertisements while you watch videos, why not just watch TV? And you might as well put physical stickers on my TV screen if overlay ads (see this Wired piece about Overlay.tv) are the alternative. However, Tel Aviv-based startup Innovid may be onto something with their ideas for interactive in-video ad placements. Imagine an interactive version of the Fight Club Ikea catalog scene. The possibilities here are compelling. In the meantime, free stuff is free stuff. Stop sticking ads in my free stuff! If you want to make money, get clever like Monty Python, and guilt-trip your viewers into making you #2 in sales on Amazon.

New WhiteHouse.gov: Spiffier Than Joe Biden’s Teeth!

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:32:48 +0000

It’s kind of refreshing in a way to look for old Bush press information and encounter the image at left. The Obama administration didn’t waste a second hitting the “Delete” button and getting new content on the White house web site yesterday. I’m excited by the prominence of the message that “WhiteHouse.gov will be a central part of President Obama’s pledge to make his the most transparent and accountable administration in American history“, and the fact that the administration’s Director of New Media Macon Phillips had a blog post up the first day is encouraging. However, contrary to this Wired.com article’s perception of all the technical genius going on, my inauguration day experience with technology was a little frustrating. I don’t have regular TV, so often watch things like this on line. When I visited the CNN live feed, even though it queued me up before I got an active stream, I thought it was pretty cool that I could see my friends “live blogging” (even though I seemed to be the only person I know who LOVED Aretha’s hat) since I had recently been logged into FaceBook. That is, until the second time I commented on the stream, when the video died. Rather than wait in line again at CNN, I fired up my Joost account, only to find it couldn’t connect. I eventually went to the Joost home page (Hulu was having seizures too) and got a solid stream. Until about 5 minutes into the speech, at which point it just sputtered out completely, so I switched on NPR (and people wonder why I’m such a late adopter with technology. Puh!) In any case, I couldn’t be more enthused about the changey hopey, and I’m glad there seems to be enough humor in this new administration that maybe we’ll have more things like joebidensteeth.com. Smile everybody! It’s a new era!

Grandma Asks “What The Hulu Is Joost?”

admin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:35:30 +0000

Many of us don’t have to worry about the switch to digital broadcast TV scheduled for February of this year, but apparently 3 Million viewers are expected to let their TV’s “go dark” on that day. Although corporate media news sources have been saying since the early 90′s that we would soon live our entire lives through our Internet connected TV (see this Time Magazine cover), the stark reality is that in spite of the availability of TV content on the web via services like Joost and Hulu, and in spite of ill-conceived notions like Yahoo’s TV Widgets (with TV screens already 20% full of “crawl”, who needs more, even if it’s personalized?) we still think of TV time and Internet time as separate activities (with the web winning sometimes). With all the available options, I’m personally left as befuddled as the old lady in the video clip at left, which ironically is TV content brought to you via YouTube. Especially in light of current economic uncertainty, it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. My bet since 1992 or so has been on AT&T slowly beating Comcast , but whatever the outcome, AT&T’s ventures into this market so far are expected to at least benefit customers through increased competition.

Nice Shorts

admin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:01:14 +0000

Back in 2003, I became convinced (probably because of my own goldfish-like attention span) that the real future of film and video entertainment would be in any content that lasts less than twenty minutes. Around that time, Fox Searchlabs was launched, offering amazingly well-conceived and produced shorts created by up-and-comers at Fox Searchlight, usually shorts less than 10-15 minutes long. Even that recently, streaming video was a bit of a joke, but especially with the advent of streaming HD, this is becoming a really viable media (especially with services like Joost). Some favorites of mine from that pre-YouTube era include Hang Time, the video at left; Farm Sluts, about a guy who loses his job because of a porn-infected e-mail he receives at work; and The Birthday Suit, about a 50-year-old mom and businesswoman who has a little misunderstanding about her birthday gift. Fox Searchlab is still on line, but for newer high-quality shorts you can check out sites like NiceShorts.com or TheSmalls.com

Getting Joost

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:02:54 +0000

As a media-addicted person who can’t stand conventional television (I shut off my cable service in 2004), I’m always looking for new ways to feed my film & video jones. For television programs that people recommend, I usually BitTorrent . For news video, I can usually find a decent stream somewhere on the web. For film, I rent a lot of DVD’s, and catch the couple of big-screen-worthy films released each year in an actual theater, usually at matinee prices. Yes, I’m a cheap bastard. That’s why I was intrigued last year when I heard that the guys who created Skype and the much-litigated Kazaa (Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis) were working on a project called Joost , a system for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer technology. Although I signed up as an early Beta user, the available content at launch time didn’t thrill me, so I waited until today to try it. If you want some television-like content on your computer, you HAVE to try this. After a reasonable download (11MB) and a very simple account setup, I was browsing an amazing variety of worthwile content. Media partners include A&E, PBS, National Geographic, CBS, BET, and many, many more. According to their site, 28,000+ shows and 480+ channels. You can download Joost here.