Internet Televison Content Coming of Age

Thomas Hawk writes "The Washington Post has an article out this morning on the assortment of internet based TV choices that are popping up providing additional and competing content to the major studios. Most of these providers are operating more as content collectors or aggregators than actual content producers."

About time

[qurve]

Sometimes you just want to see the show you want, when you want to. I'm actually surprised it took so long for it to come about. But now that on-demand television is getting popular, on-demand TV from your computer is the next logical step.

Don't forget Bittorrent!

[exhilaration]

You can get most popular shows via BitTorrent [bittorrent.com]. Check out this great site [btefnet.org] for a listing. And check out Azureus [sourceforge.net] if you're looking for a great client!

ya right

[Anonymous Coward]

Ill believe it when I start hearing more about it and not from some guys personal belief that its coming of age. Not newsworthy IMO

Sounds more line on-demand TV...

[sp00]

After skimming the article it seems like these are more like on demand content services rather than other "Internet TV" providers. [useit.com]

Use of new technology for old technology

[binaryDigit]

I find it highly amusing that old technology is used to support new technology which is then used to supply the features of old technologies. Case 1, telephones. POTS lines are used to carry modem traffic which is now used to carry voip (i.e. telephone) traffic. Cable lines are used to carry ip traffic which is now being utilized to receive tv. Gotta luv it.

Re:Too early.

[OzzyRulez]

From a marketing perspective, now is the perfect time to bring this out. It's something new to attract more people to high-speed internet. By now, most people who don't have high-speed in areas where high-speed is readily available will probably not ever have high-speed unless there is more available through it.

Mainstream programs?

[tji]

After looking through the WWW sites for Akimbo and DaveTV, I see a distinct lack of mainstream TV.

Since buying an HDTV tuner, and hooking a small antenna to it, I can get all my local stations for free - in a quality leaps and bounds better than what cable or satellite provides. So, there are only a few things keeping me paying those high monthly fees.

- The Daily Show with John Stewart. This could be easily done via Internet TV. I would gladly pay a few bucks a week/month to just get this and not all the other garbage on cable.

- Occasionally, I like to be able to get CNN. But, for the most part I use online news sources, so this is not crucial.

- Sports Programming. ESPN carries a lot of college basketball, sunday night NFL, etc. This would not necessarily transfer over to Internet TV well, because I don't want to request download & see it after the fact.. I want to see it live. Also, when you consider their push into HDTV services.. this is very hard to replicate via Internet. I don't know if this is enough to keep me paying $60++ per month. But, I would be very tempted when my college was being carried on an ESPN-HD game.

- HD movie channels. These are nice to have.. but, DVD's are an acceptable substitute. In a few years, we will have HD-DVD's, decreasing the appeal of HD movie channels.

At this point, I think that if I had the ability to access the few mainstream cable programs I want at a reasonable cost, I would dump cable TV.

Re:Between DaveTV and Akimbo

[Anonymous Coward]

First I have to buy a PC, I own a Mac outside of my servers. But assume I build a PC, I have to buy Windows, and I can't just use my old copy of Win98 I have to have WinXP.

Forget that, why can't they just make it web based with open standards video files that I can either download or stream inside my browser?

Re:Quality?

[hrbrmstr]

I am amazed to see the words "quality" and "TV" used in the same sentence.

HDTV presentation of crap is still crap.

Internet

[Cro Magnon]

is great for news. But what about action/adventure shows? When can I see Buffy kicking vampire butt on InternetTV? When can I see Jack Bower stopping yet another terrorist plot in 24 hours? Until InternetTV has stuff like that, it can't replace regular TV.