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Free Internet TV - Ready for prime time?


Free Internet TV - Ready for prime time?


It is alleged that you can watch TV on your computer, for free. A handful of apps make this promise, but how true is it? Lets have a look. Can I watch, say, an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" (TBBT).


JLC

"JLC’s Internet TV is a FREE program for watching and browsing thousands of TV channels freely available on the internet"

It's true there are thousands of channels. Half of them are flagged as not working, and of the rest, 9 out of 10 of them don't work. But this still leaves you with a lot and you need fashion tips in Urdo, or Buddhism lessons in Croat, this is or you. I tried to watch the BBC news and one of the 14 possabilities there did indeed work... and gave me news from last July (currently it's December). How you're supposed to know what is on is beyond me.

I suppose of you are bored this might be better than Solitaire, but I wouldn't count on keeping up with your favorite TV program with this thing. I did get a (black and white) Buster Keaton movie to work. I had no idea what I was watching, there didn't seem to be any way to find out and it seems to me the problem with watching TV on the net is you really want to be able to start at the beginning when you want to, not stumble into the middle of something that happens to be playing already. That is, I'd rather have YouTube on my TV than have TV on my computer. At any rate, no TBBT.


TVU

"TVU Networks brings you a live TV service with 1000 channels from around the world. Now, the same great content that you watch on TVU on your PC, is available right here on your iPhone through WiFi and now, 3G."

This one has a right sexy screen layout with a smooth scrolling wall of video ala the Mac. It wants to download a plugin before you can watch anything "you need to install our plugin into your Chrome browser" so I let it and rebooted the browser like it wanted and fired it up again. When I tried to watch something it gave the error "ordinal 2821 not found", I clicked ok, then it gave another error and repeated this cycle 3 times. It never did actually play anything. Looks sexy as anything though, it just doesn't actually work. Maybe it's because I used Chrome, but it seems to know I'm using Chrome so either it's supposed to work and doesn't, or they know it doesn't work and didn't do anything at the point where it recognized Chrome. Needs work. No TBBT.


MIRO

"Miro is the only internet TV you’ll need — it’s an application that brings together thousands of shows from all over the web. There’s TONS of great content, lots of it in HD, and fresh shows are added all the time. You can watch and organize video feeds when you’re offline or traveling, find TV programs on sites like Hulu, and download from sites like YouTube. Miro downloads in HD, whenever it’s available!"

Miro is a program like Windows media player, that you download and install and it installs about a zillion files then asks you if you want to run it. If you say yes this would be a good time to start reading a short novel, say "War and Peace"; to say it is not quick would be an understatement of epic proportion. Certain shows are "not available in my area" and looking at what is available I don't see what this has to do with TV. It looks like a fancy player with some subset of the kind of stuff you'd find on YouTube. Either way, no TBBT.


VEOH

"Watch videos of any length at any time with the Veoh Web Player! Watch full-length videos directly in your browser – no need to launch a separate application, Download videos from Veoh and other popular video sites for full quality, offline viewing, Organize downloaded videos in your library to watch them later."

On what planet? It's all supposed to take place in your web browser. I went there and for three minutes it went through a series of web redirects then finally said "TV shows are not available for viewing in your area". No TBBT.


VUZE

"Vuze (previously Azureus) is a BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to by .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content. Content is presented through channels and categories containing TV shows, music videos, movies, video games and others."

Vuze is a BitTorrent client, and it's a given all movies, tv shows and music can be downloaded from BitTorrent. I'm not even going to try, it seems safe to assume it's possible to download episodes of TBBT from there, but this isn't really something grandma can expect to do instead of watch TV.


So do these work? No.