If you live in the United States, most of the networks offer their TV streams for free. Most of the content is in High-definition format. As long as your connection is fast enough to handle the content, you should have no problems whatsoever.

If you happen to live anywhere else, you will have to look for other routes to get your TV fix. Luckily, there are plenty of people who post shows on different video sharing sites. This is where a lot of the dilemmas come in. Do you just watch the first link that’s posted and get it over with?

The second concern is regarding quality. If a file is available in both ‘flv’ and ‘divx’ format, which one would you prefer. For me, it depends. I don’t have a fast connection so I avoid ‘divx’ links as far as possible. However, this also depends on the quality of the other file. I can deal with minor sync issues by adjusting my media player but bad color and picture quality drives me crazy. On the other hand, a problem with divx files is that most of the sites hosting them do not support resuming downloads.

I spoke to some people about their preferences and realized it’s a matter of personal choice. Those people with limited time and slower connections preferred lower quality files. But I’d like to know what you think about it. Do you think the current choices are good enough to convince you to stop paying for cable?

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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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