gHacks technology news » livestation http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Live TV and Radio with Livestation http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/17/live-tv-and-radio-with-livestation/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/17/live-tv-and-radio-with-livestation/#comments Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:06:49 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/17/live-tv-and-radio-with-livestation/ I received a beta invitation to Livestation yesterday in my mailbox and first thought it was some kind of spam because I could not remember signing up for the service at all. Apparently though Livestation is a legit service supported by Microsoft to provide the user with live tv and radio streamings. The invitation that I received was for the technical beta of Livestation, if you are interested in participating as well you might fill out the form at the Livestation website, it might take some time before you receive the invitation though.

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.

livestation

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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