Recently, many websites have started to show shows free online but do so in a legal fashion, paying for the shows using advertisements.

Different websites seem to work in different jurisdiction but it is fair to say that a large amount is available to viewers from the United States only. Here are a few resources to watch tv shows online.

South Park Studios famously provided their shows online free of charge because the show’s creators were annoyed of people watching their shows illegally. Unfortunately, South Park Studios is not available in Great Britain; I suspect it is North America only.

Joost, the much hyped IPTV service which recently has recently made the transition from software to web-based, boasts a number of titles, both mainstream and online-only. In the UK, and possibly other countries, titles such as Babylon 5, Peep Show, Shameless and Robot Chicken.

YouTube has recently announced it will start ‘serving full-length TV dinners‘ including shows like Star Trek: The Original Series, MacGyver and Beverly Hills 90210. Unfortunately, this is unavailable in Europe.

Hulu is a site which offers free, ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and films from NBC and FOX, amongst others. This includes shows like The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy and even The Office! Predictably, this is also only for Americans.

BBC iPlayer is a free streaming video service kindly provided to people in the United Kingdom. iPlayer allows Brits to watch most shows broadcasted on a BBC channel in the past week on-demand. The BBC even admits that iPlayer technically does not require a licence fee, a type of tax which any British person with a TV set pays to help support the non-commercial BBC.

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One of the initial advantages of Joost was the software client. Yes, it had its problems but it provided interesting features that are hard to impossible to realize in a web client. For one, switching between channels and shows was more or less instant, the web client delays requests because that is how the web works.

Users do need an account before they can watch any show on the website which is one of the big drawbacks of the system. The other drawback is the lack of mainstream media. Yes, you find some tv shows that are free to watch for users from authorized countries but there is not a lot mainstream wise that you cannot watch somewhere else on the Internet.

What Joost needs more than anything else is killer content. Not necessarily tv series like 24 or Alias. It could be something more geeky exotic like a huge Anime archive or Independent movies. There should also be room for educational content.

Joost cannot compete with Youtube because of the sheer mass and sites like Hulu because of their content.

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The service currently requires a plugin to work properly but this need will fall away in the coming month according to Techcrunch when the Joost Standard service is introduced. The plugin is still needed for live and high definition broadcasts while all other shows are available for users without plugin as well. The Adobe Flash plugin will still be needed but this is pretty much a standard plugin on most computers nowadays.

Rumors are that Joost will stop development on the software client to concentrate fully on the Joost website which they are trying to establish as a video based social network type of website that comes with all the usual features and functions of those websites.

The move will surely see an increase in usage numbers but the real question is if it will be enough to keep the service alive. Taking it to the web means that it now has to compete with many already established video portals such as Youtube, Dailymotion or Hulu.

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Insufficient bandwidth means that there is not enough bandwidth available to transport all the date from the Zattoo server to the client PC. The effect is a distorted pictures from time to time that is showing artifacts and interrupted sounds.

The major problem with this error message is that you cannot change the quality settings currently in Zattoo. It sometimes helps to switch the channel for a few seconds and go back to the channel that did display the insufficient bandwidth message. It happened more than once that the message will not appear again. That’s unfortunately the only fix that I was able to find for this problem.

Zattoo is currently available in many different countries in Europe including Germany, England, France and Switzerland.

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The Adobe Media Player is divided into two key areas. The first are the Genres like Documentary or News that loads a list of shows that can be watched in that category. All the shows are prerecorded so don’t expect to be able to watch tonights shows live in the player.The genres do not contain the shows of the networks, or not all of them which is kinda confusing.

If you want to watch the latest episode of CSI for instance you have to click on networks > CBS > CSI and select the show in that menu. You cannot click on the Entertainment category or Drama (which is not existing) to access the show.

The image quality is surprisingly good and can be compared to that of Hulu, far better than the image quality of Youtube for instance. The interface however feels a little bit sluggish, it always takes a second or so before the next menu is showing up which would be fine for a web application but not for a desktop player.

There is no country restriction currently in place. This means everyone from all over the world may watch the latest episodes of Jericho, CSI or The Hills. You will see advertisement though. The Adobe Media Player will be popular with networks and content creators because of its ad displaying capabilities. It is not limited to in video ads which is a major advantage I guess.

One nice feature is that CBS has added many original Star Trek episodes to the player. If you are a Trekkie you are probably going to love that player. Streams started right away with no delay whatsoever. It surely depends on the Internet connection though and users with slower connections might experience those delays in the beginning until the buffering is sufficient to stream the show.

I won’t be using the Adobe Media Player after this day because it is not offering anything that I would really need. I will closely observe the progress though and make the switch once they add content that is more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice media player but it does not offer anything that the other media players do not offer.

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They made it clear in their announcement that they expect that some things will go wrong, obviously live is something completely different than the prerecorded shows that they use to stream normally.

I’m not sure about this but I guess you need the latest client that was released yesterday to be able to take part in the live test. I definitely will tune in to see how the image quality will hold up against other services that stream live Internet. Another aspect that is quite interesting is the delay of the image compared to normal television. How many seconds will the stream be behind in the coverage ?

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The first real test will be the live streaming of all NCAA basketball championships games starting next Thursday which will be available to users world wide which comes a little bit surprising if you consider how other Internet TV services (like Hulu) tend to ignore viewers from outside the United States.

The other good news is that there will only be in-stream ads which is only fair I guess if you consider it’s free and live. The Joost team is looking forward to this first large scale live test which could bring up related problems that are not foreseeable at the moment. I guess the best thing is to enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it is pretty exciting that Joost is finally starting to deliver live content which was always something that held them back in my opinion. From there the possibilities are endless, providing the software and service work as intended.

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The requirements for Livestation are Windows XP Service Pack 2 or newer, which includes Windows Vista, and Microsoft Silverlight. A version for Apple Macintosh computers is currently developed. After some serious troubles with getting Microsoft Silverlight to install (it was working in Firefox and prompting me for installation in Internet Explorer all the time) I was able to get a look at the current version of Livestation.

Livestation is currently offering nine TV stations and one Radio station that are streamed live to the users computer. I did experience some connection problems which was very unfortunate but not a huge problem if you consider that this is a beta and not the release version.

The nine TV channels are:

Al Jazeera (English)
BBC World
BBC World Service
Bloomberg Television
Euronews (English)
Euronews (French)
France 24 (English)
France 24 (French)
Sky News

And the single Radio Station is BBC Radio 4. Not all stations are available for all users however. Some stations are only available in certain countries, for example BBC News 24 is only available in the United Kingdom and users from other countries are not seeing that channel at all.

The quality of the stream is extremely nice, much better quality than you can expect from those P2P clients like TVU Player and even Joost. The real drawback currently is the lack of channels but that is understandable if you consider that this is a technical release and not a public release.

Controls are non existing, almost at least and the interface of say Joost is much nicer than that of Livestation. I however prefer the minimalistic approach, I don’t want to write comments or chat with other users while watching TV.

Livestation is very promising and if they manage to convince more TV stations it could be comparable to Zattoo which is already live in several countries. In terms of video quality it exceeds it already.

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You can then pick a language from the available languages and subtitles are automatically shown if they do exist for the show. If you register an account with Subjoost you can add and request subtitles. There are not that many subtitles available currently but this will surely increase over the next days with all the news coverage the service is getting.

The good thing is that it is a community driven project which will surely mean that we are going to see more subtitles pretty soon. Take a look at the available subtitles on the website that displays all existing subtitles.

via Download Squad

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I would classify Miro as a videocast player with extended functionality. If you think Joost or Bablegum now you are wrong because Miro is open plattform while the other two are not. Open Plattform, what’s that again ? Open Plattform means that any video producer can get his videos on Miro and that every viewer can also add videos using urls. Try that with Joost.

Another huge difference is that videos are actually downloaded to your hard drive and placed by default in the My Videos folder if you are using Windows. That means that you can watch them, burn them or send them to a friend without problems. The option to send a email link to a friend also exists in Miro btw.

The quality of the video depends how it was encoded but I can say that it is better than the quality of Joost from what I have seen so far.

The channel system has another advantage. You can subscribe to channels and when you do that you can opt to download new videos automatically when they are published. A few default channels are already added to your sidebar but those naturally don’t appeal to everyone.

If you take a look at the categories offered you notice 3283 categories like Music, Food and Sports at the moment. A click on a category opens a list of available publishers and a click on a publisher the list of available videos from that publishers. Videos can be downloaded with the click of the left mouse button and can be added to playlists which are filled by dragging and dropping downloaded videos into them.

Besides the possibility to add videos from channels or urls users can also search popular video portals like Youtube, Google Video and Dailymotion and add videos found there to their library. Those videos are downloaded as well which means that you can watch them with another video player or send them to your friends easily.

If I had something to criticize it would be the following. You can’t reach the category list from everywhere nor is there a home button. I had to click on Miro Guide to access these features. Another criticism is that you can’t go back since there is no back button. This is for example irritating if you browse a channel and find a publisher that sounds interesting. Once you click on that publisher you can’t get back to the list of channels.

There is no way to navigate search results if you search one of the video portals. You only see a handful of results and can’t browse to a existing second page of results. At least I could not figure out how this would be possible. It would be nice if it would be possible to search multiple video portals at once and see one results list.

Yes, that screenshot is from the game Cannon Fodder on the Commodore Amiga by the Bitmap Brothers.

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Several changes have been introduced to the user interface as well which give Joost a cleaner look. One feature should be mentioned as well. It is now possible to create links to Joost shows and share them with other users.

I did encounter a new bug however. Joost is not showing up when I start the application and what is much worth I’m not able to kill the process tvprunner.exe using the task manager. It consumes 99% of cpu resources and the only thing that is killing it is to restart the computer. Not really practicable.

Deleting the Joost directory in Application Data did not help either which means that my computer running Windows XP is not able to start Joost at the moment.

The shows offered at Joost are still considered B-content by many including me. Unless they really add some high quality content they are doomed to fail even with all the news coverage that they get.

Let me know if you want a Joost invitation and I send it out using Joost on my Windows Vista notebook.

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I had to admit that I was one of the beta testers that did not use Joost at all anymore and wanted to take a look to see what has changed in the meantime. I can sum it up pretty quickly though and was a little bit disappointed that my old criticism was still holding true.

Joost added some more channels to the system but still does not offer any premium content channels. The channels that are offered, lets take Gong TV, Guinness World Records or Watch Mojo are programs that appeal to only a handful of users at best. You find better entertainment at sites like Youtube for instance.

Joost offers some niche channels that might appeal to a wider audience such as the World Poker Tour channel with old poker tournament videos or the NHL 2007 playoff channel. Most channels however are really disappointing.

I can’t say that the image quality has improved in the few months that passed by, it still looks not that nicely fullscreen. Better than Youtube videos fullscreen but no comparison to real TV or HD content on the Internet.

I still have hopes that they will deliver better content at the time that they are going public with their software – make a big announcement perhaps that raises interest in the service. I promise that I will take another look in a few months or when they make a new announcement / release a new version.

Joost invites are still available, if you want some let me know.

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All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it – well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.

Down and Dirty is a Rock, Metal, Pop and Punk channel with videos from acts like Sum41, Korn and Everclear. This are not (!) music videos but some mix of music, interviews and other elements.

I especially like the R-rated movie section called Reel Junkies which is really enjoyable. You do find videos with many celebrities on No Good TV showing the Celebs from their “bad” sides. Great if you like this kind of stuff.

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This is actually the first time that I saw a notice on the Joost website listing saying which channels would be available in which country. I think it is really interesting to see that users from the United States will be exempt from many channels – possibly a distribution rights issue. Some channels on the other hand are only available to users from the United States (MTV and Comedy Channel to name two).

If you take a look at the What’s on website at Joost you see what I mean. Joost announced high-profile ads from companies like Coca Cola and HP but the content currently offered does not justify those ads. It remains to be soon how the users react when they see what Joost has to offer.

Everything is still free to watch so it will surely draw a crowd that like their things free. I would like to see really good content offered at Joost. What about a movie channel with up to date (or classic..) movies that everyone can watch ? What about live sports events ? I’m sure many users would pay some money to be able to see such things.

Will you give Joost a try once it comes out ?

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If you are looking for high rated TV shows like Lost, 24 or Prison Break you’ve come to the wrong place. I was fortunate enough to get a temporary invite for Zattoo which is live TV on your computer. This is a different and probably the better working method for now to stream TV content over the Internet. Zattoo is a European company which already has more than 300000 subscribers to their service and will soon become available in many European countries including Germany, Great Britain and France.

I was able to test an internation version of Zattoo which was able to stream all tv programs currently available. Those are the same tv stations that can be seen in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Switzerland using a normal TV. Some of the stations that are currently available include: BBC Prime and World, Canale 5, France 2-5, ARD and ZDF and Rai Une to Tre.

Image quality of the shows is excellent, it takes a few seconds until all artifacts disappear but from that moment on it looks great. It is possible to watch the shows in fullscreen with a slightly better image quality than Joost or Bablegum offer at this moment.

Zattoo is currently preparing launches in major European countries and if they will be successful they intend to expand to the American market as well.

I personally think that Zattoo is far more complete at this stage than Joost and Bablegum are. You can actually see live TV which includes for instance sports events like Champions League, the Olympics and Formula 1. It is also a great assistance in learning new languages. What could be better to learn French than to listen to French television ?

Image quality is far superior to other known p2p Internet clients such as TVU Player. Watchout Joost, Bablegum – here comes Zattoo.

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The default selection does not contain all channels that are available and I was able to add a Poker channel for instance using the Channel Catalog. I would estimate that only a third of all available channels are added by default, everything else has to be added using the Joost Channel Catalog. You can add some great shows like Poker TV, a Trance channel and some pretty obscure ones like the recipe channel or a hobby channel.

It seems that Joost is slowly adding more channels to the tv program to be ready when they go live. It would really hurt their reputation if they would not offer enough “good” channels for their viewers. I’m however missing a poker channel from the last release which has been replaced with the new sponsored poker channel. Where is the World Series of Poker Coverage ?

Did I mention that I got five new invites for Joost ? If you like one drop a comment and let me know why you deserve one. I pick five random dudes at the end of the week who get the invite. Make sure you use a valid email to write the comment. It would also be nice if you would share your invites that you get with other users here in the comments.

Update: All of my five invitations have been given to users who replied in this thread: They are Andrew, TJ, Andre, Runge and Blur3d. Everyone else could get an invite if the newly invited get invites as well and share them with the rest.

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Another similarity is the fact that both services are currently running a closed beta test with the rare chance for users to receive a beta invitation. I was lucky enough to receive one for Bablegum and shortly after for Joost and would like to take the opportunity and write about their current state: How is it working, how does the content look like, what about the interface aso.

The Babelgum client uses about 42 megabytes on the hard drive and always starts in full screen mode. It offers currently nine different channels with trailers, commercials, sports and animations which is not really spectacular.

I suppose they do not want to add the real content during beta phase, would make much sense either in my opinion. If you click on a channel you get to see a selection of possible shows that you can watch. Clicking a show loads it – this usually takes only a matter of seconds.

The interface is pretty straightforward. You have a mini remote control in the upper right corner that can be used to navigate through the shows, change the size of the video and increase or decrease the sound level. A top bar displays the time the video is playing and shows how much time is left for the current video.

The bottom line holds the main interface with links to all tv channels and videos. The interface disappears after a few seconds of not moving the mouse. It is possible to playback the videos in a window instead of fullscreen – this does not seem to reduce the amount of data that is transfered though.

Two minutes of playback was downloading about 6,5 megabytes and uploading about 0,5 megabytes. This should be fine for most connections starting with 1 mbit.

The Joost client is using about 25 megabytes on the hard drive which is about 40% less than the Babelgum client. It also starts directly in full screen mode and starts with an interesting trailer that tries to describe what the founders of Joost try to create with their service.

A two minute session with Joost downloaded about 5.5 megabytes of data and uploaded 1.1 megabytes. Image quality looks pretty similar between Joost and Babelgum. Both look ok in fullscreen mode, definitely better than Youtube videos but worse than analog tv or tv rips that you can download from p2p.

Joost offers 22 channels in its current stage. All of the channels are more or less non-mainstream channels with the exception of MTV Staying Alive and National Geographics. All channels have a certain amount of clips in them that can be played.

The interface looks different to that of Babelgum but offers nearly the same functionality. Change programs and channels on the fly, rate shows, change the volume and switch between fullscreen and windowed mode.

I honestly can’t see a lot of differences between Joost and Babelgum at the moment. It all seems to come down to content, pricing and quality after all and there are currently no information about pricing and content. I will keep everyone updated with new information about the services as soon as they become available.

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Joost is one of the few services that sprang up lately that want to offer tv experience over the internet. You download their client and can watch the shows that they offer using a broadband internet connection. The main advantage over television is the fact that it is more interactive with features such as searching, rating shows and chat functionality.

Video Playback is done in full screen which looks ok, it is definitely not hd quality but the quality is enough to enjoy the movie.

The current list of programs and shows is rather small which can surely be attributed to the ongoing beta test which does not require the latest tv shows. You get to see some documentations, sports and game shows which is a good start but can be viewed elsewhere on the internet as well.

I wish everyone best of luck, may the luckiest one win the beta invitation ;)

Update: Well this post has been covered by Technoratis Buzz TV, check it out if you like. Thanks Aaron for the coverage and the reminder by email.

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