The power to watch what you want
The concept of using the Internet to deliver television is far from new even though telephone companies are hyping the television services that they are deploying as the new. Back in halcyon days of the dot com boom there was one startup that delivered television to those few who had access to broadband service. Icravetv.com provided TV signals from Toronto and Buffalo stations to Internet users using streaming video technology that was available at the time. The pictures were small and the audio hardly coherent, as the site became more popular server congestion became a massive problem. Finally the movie studios and sports leagues sent their armies of lawyers and sunk Icravetv.com out of business in a sea of copyright lawsuits that predates the original Napster.
Another new startup is now using peer-to-peer technology to provide online access to television stations. A Chinese company called tvunetworks has a free client that receives signals using bittorrent. In the old server client model as more people access content servers get congested and people watching will see more re-buffering than actual content. With using bittorrent the more people watching means more sources to distribute the video data giving better picture and sound than traditional streamed video.
Being a Chinese company there are plenty of Asian TV networks available, but the major American networks are available. Feeds ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox come from San Francisco. This is very handy because the US network feeds I get on cable come from the eastern time zone so if I miss a program I can just start the TVU Player program and watch what I missed a couple of hours later. There are some American cable networks available on TVU. Most notably is CNN but the best part is some of the long forbidden fruits such as ESPN, Comedy Central, USA network, and Disney Channel are now available for Canadians to watch. Unrestricted access to these channels shows how absolutely draconian Canadian broadcast regulations are. Even just being able to watch favorites from the US broadcast networks without sim-sub is breath of fresh air.
The picture quality is far from broadcast quality, but watching full screen on my computer monitor a few feet back it is surprisingly watchable. The sound is a little tinny but it is clear. Upon selecting a channel there is about 30 seconds to a minute the program spends buffering and even then the first minute isn’t great looking but after that it’s very good for video that comes over the Internet. The American broadcast networks give the best quality picture and sound with the cable networks are compressed a lot heavier so the quality leaves a lot more to be desired.
In the first week of using the program, some channels appear in a sort of a test mode. These channels but if this is a preview of what is coming then the future will be good. In recent days an Asian version of HBO has shown up. Will the original American HBO show up, I’m hoping for it. There are many other American cable networks I would like to see.
All that’s needed to run TVU is a PC running Windows 2000 or XP, Windows Media Player 9, and high speed Internet service. One challenge is finding out what is on and what is coming on in the near future. There was a (www.tiidoo.com) website with this information which appears to have crashed from the server load.
TVU player may not put any cable companies out of business, but it is a very good supplement to any programming supplier. It will be the viewer who will benefit the most finally receiving power to choose watch what they want to watch and government officials can’t get in the way.