gHacks technology news » tv shows

Watch TV online legally

Joe — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:23:03 +0000

The Internet is often a place where unlicensed television shows are easy to watch, albeit through websites offering streaming, torrents or USENET.

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.

Tags: bbc iplayer, hulu, joost, southparkstudios, tv shows, tv-online, watch tv online, watch-tv, youtube

Torrent Episode Downloader

Martin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:53:53 +0000

TV Shows are one of the most popular media that get downloaded from Bittorrent. It’s very handy for viewing missed episodes of a favorite tv show or to view tv shows in their original language and not the translated version that fails to catch the spirit of the original show. I don’t want to talk about the legal aspect. It is my opinion that everyone should make the decision for himself whether he downloads TV shows from Bittorrent.

Ted, which stands for Torrent Episode Downloader, is probably the easiest way to download tv shows from Bittorrent. The application has been designed specifically for that purpose. It comes with a range of preconfigured shows (more than 100) that are displayed by default. Many popular tv shows are listed including 24, Battlestar Galactica, CSI and Lost among others.

It works like the following. The user picks a show from the list and Ted displays a description of that show along with a list of episodes that are currently available. Episodes are just listed as Season 2, Episode 4 which makes it a bit harder to find out if that is the show that you missed for example unless you want to download a full season.

Next to that is the original air date of that show and the availability on the network. The main advantage of Ted is that it is easy to use with close to zero configuration and has a wide assortment of shows in the list. Custom shows can be added to Ted as well. It does have some shortcomings though which I would like to address.

First of all not all episodes of the tv shows are listed which means that you will miss episodes if you use TED exclusively. If you use another Bittorrent client and Bittorrent websites for downloading those shows you could easily download everything from there right away which would make TED redundant.

There is not a lot of information available when downloading a show which is great for inexperienced users but experts will miss some details that they are used to analyse when downloading from Bittorrent.

Tags: bittorrent, ted, torrent episode downloader, torrents, tv, tv shows

Windows Media Center blocks TV Show recordings on request

Martin — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:10:10 +0000

The last days were filled with news that Windows Media Center users were not able to record several NBS TV shows including American Gladiators and Medium. Forums and websites were filled with speculations until an email from a Microsoft representative to News.com clarified the issue.

According to that email Microsoft adheres to broadcast flags included in the video stream that limits the rights of the users on the receiving end. Windows Media Center users however will not be pleased to hear that software and hardware developers do not have any obligations to interpretate the broadcast flags at all but Microsoft apparently decided to side with the content distributors effectively turning against a part of their customer base.

EFF’s Danny O’Brien commented on the issue in a blog post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website. (unfortunately slashdotted right now): “They’ve imposed restrictions way beyond what the law requires. Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment. Right now, the only way customers know what Microsoft has agreed to is when the technology they’ve bought suddenly stops working. Microsoft needs to come clean and tell its customers what deals it has made.’”

It is still unclear if NBC set the broadcast flag to test the waters or if it was an accident that was not supposed to be happening. The most interesting information of the whole incident is the fact that Windows Media Center follows the broadcast flags, that content distributors can regulate what viewers may or may not do with the content stream and that old hardware that was produced before hardware had to be broadcast-flag compliant was not affected at all.

Tags: microsoft, nbc, tv, tv shows, tv-streams, universal, windows media center

Adobe Media Player

Martin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:53:15 +0000

My first though was “Oh no, not another media player”. Adobe Media Player is based on the Adobe Air plattform which has to be installed before the media player can be installed.Think of flash for the desktop and you are more or less there. The interior of the media player reminds me a lot about Joost or Bablegum. Users can select prerecorded shows that they can watch with the majority of content looking to be from independent publishers and only some well known tv-shows and publishers on board at the moment with CBS and MTV probably the biggest currently.

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.

Tags: adobe, adobe media player, cbs, joost, media-player, tv shows

Hulu now publically available kind of

Martin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:54:17 +0000

Hulu has left private beta and is now publically available to US-consumers which is definitely a good thing. Users can just go and visit the official Hulu website and browse the contents and play anything they like in their browser. Hulu does have a good selection of movies and tv episodes from popular media companies like Fox, Universal Pictures, Sony or MGM.

The selection of tv shows is actually pretty good. You get to see Animations like The Simpsons and Family Guy, Crime & Mystery like Bones or Team Knight Rider but also pretty old – but still cool tv shows – like Simon & Simon or Emergency Room. Should be something for everyone, great if you do not know what to do for a certain amount of time.

Users from outside the United States, for example US citizens traveling to Europe or another location, can use the free application Hotspot Shield to view Hulu content even if they are abroad. Check out my article on accessing Hulu – and other services – using Hotspot Shield.

Tags: hotspot shield, hulu, internet-tv, movies, Online TV, tv shows

How many video players do we need ?

Martin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:35:12 +0000

My initial answer was one – of course – but then I realized that it is not that easy to answer. One video player is enough to play most videos on my computer, I use SMPlayer for this purpose. But what about all those video portals from tv companies or other companies that rent or distribute videos online ? It is beginning to get a little messy now.

Each tv company that sets up a video portal with the option to download videos is building their own video player. We got NBC Direct and HBO on Broadband for instance, Netflix and Apple of course. That’s four different video players each with its own restrictions. If you want to use all four services you have to install four different clients that basically do the same, they restrict usage.

The messy part begins when you take a look at expiration dates and the like. Do you know when videos that you have downloaded expire in all of these services ? Is there a way to keep track of the dates without having to open all the applications to take a look at all downloaded videos ?

What I mean is that it does not make much sense from a consumer point of view to create one video client per service. The companies on the other hand want full control of the player and their content which is probably the main reason why they do not create cooperations with other companies that basically do the same thing.

I can’t give an answer to the question above, a universal answer I mean. I still say we only need one player but we probably will end up with one player for each company that is entering the market which could be quite a few.

Tags: drm, hbo on broadband, nbc direct, tv shows, video players

Watch Documentaries Online

Martin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:05:49 +0000

It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.

One sector that was a bit neglected until now was documentaries. Best Online Documentaries is a website that tries to change that. They offer nearly 650 documentaries embedded in their website that are hosted on servers like Google Video or Youtube. Viewers can watch the documentaries online on their website.

Several categories like Biographies, History, Science and Mystery and numerous subcategories make it easy to find what you are interested in. All the videos that I tested worked and have a playing time of 40+ minutes. The language is English. Below is one of the videos that you can find on the website. You could really spend several days there.

Tags: documentaries, google-video, history, science videos, tv shows, video

FanCast watch TV Shows online

Martin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:28:54 +0000

Fancast is a service by the cable provider Comcast who streams dozens of popular tv shows from Battlestar Galactica to The Office and The Unit free on their website. The service is available to viewers with a US IP only which means that everyone else will not be able to view the tv shows unless they hide their IP with a service like Hotspot Shield.

The amount of tv-shows offered at FanCast is incredible, seems to be more than 100 shows that can be selected. A quick test revealed 11 full episodes of 24, 2 Numb3rs episodes, 7 30-days episodes. The usual amount seems to be between 2-10 for most shows.

Most episodes show advertisements before playing the shows but that is fine I guess, it has to be financed somehow. Resolution is 384 x 288 and the quality of the video is good enough and far superior to those of Youtube. You do get recommendations on the right side of the video and a short description of the video that you are currently viewing.

Tags: comcast, fancast, hulu, tv episodes, tv shows

Watch NBC Shows in Veoh

Martin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:38:56 +0000

NBC offers two official ways to watch their tv shows online. The first is NBC Direct which forces uses to download and install DRM infested software that adds the permanent MediaAgent.exe process to your system wasting resources even though the NBC Direct client is not running.

The second is the website Hulu which is currently invite only and hard to get in. Even if you do you still need to access it from the United States to be able to watch the tv shows. A reader, M.Keezay, told me in the comments that the software Veoh TV would also play NBC Shows free of charge and without country restrictions. (Did I ever tell you, my readers, how much I value your comments and remarks ? They are incredible !)

Veoh TV is a client software comparable to Joost. Once installed the user has to log in, or create an account, and will then be able to watch tv channels in the software. There is NBC with 22 shows including Heroes, My Name is Earl, The Office, Las Vegas, Scrubs and more as well as 154 other channels, most offering similar content that Joost offers.

Not all episodes or seasons are available but you do find five episodes of your favorite tv shows listed and you can opt to watch some or all of them.

Every show begins with a 10-20 second advertisement which is understandable if you consider bandwidth and server costs to run a service like Veoh TV.

Another remarkable channel is CBS which offers additional tv shows like all of the CSI series, Shark, Survivor China, How I met your Mother (the best), Big Bang Theory (even better) and Numbers.

This is probably the best way of watching those tv shows if you do not reside in the United States currently. Great news for every US-American who does not want to miss his favorite tv shows if he is on a trip outside the country.

Tags: hulu, nbc direct, tv shows, watch free tv series

NBC Launches Direct Video Downloads

Martin — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:39:05 +0000

I’m a bit puzzled by the recent launch of NBC’s Direct, a video downloads website just a few weeks after launching Hulu together with News Corp. Direct Video Downloads sound nice at first glance which is exactly what users would like. Instead of watching the tv episodes at Hulu online they can now download the videos and watch them whenever they feel fit to do it.

There are however several catches which really reduce the attractiveness and quality of this new video download service. The service uses DRM, works with Internet Explorer, requires a NBC Direct software to download and view the movies and requires you to have a IP from the United States.

The selection is limited at this time offering episodes from The Office, 30 Rock, Life, Bionic Woman, Friday Night Lights at this time and only the latest episode is available for download at NBC Direct. The service seems to be rather unstable at this moment because my first tries of launching the NBC Direct player ended in an offline (Storefront is offline) notice.

What’s even worse is that there is no way to try to reconnect to the service from within the player and I did not have the impression that the player tried to auto connect to it either. Closing the player and opening it again was the only solution that I could come up with.

It should also be mentioned that downloaded tv episodes will not be in your library forever. You have got two days after hitting the play button for the first time to watch the video which will become defunct after that period.

To sum it up. The pros are that the NBC Direct service is free at the moment. Cons are that it uses DRM, only works with Internet Explorer, requires a proprietary software, offers only five tv shows and only one episode of them at any given time, has connection issues and lets the users watch the tv episodes in a period of 48 hours after pressing play for the first time.

NBC should really take a look at Torrent sites to see how such a service could be created that would be successful.

Tags: nbc, nbc direct, tv episodes, tv shows

Play TV Shows online

Martin — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 18:06:08 +0000

If you ever wanted to be a guest in one of those famous tv shows such as Deal or no Deal, Who wants to be a Millionaire or Blockbusters. WeDigTV, the World’s first TV2 Network, lets you play these shows and a couple more blending show footage with interactivity.

The interaction is well done and brings back some memories. Make sure you choose the Free Play to just play the shows for fun. I was not sure what the paid version is for and honestly I did not bother looking it up on their website. Blockbuster for instance was fun but the opponent team always got the right answer which is not really what I expected.

Read More:

We Dig TV

Tags: blockbuster, interactive games, tv shows, we dig tv

Joost 1.0 Beta is out

Martin — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 09:13:06 +0000

Joost has released yet another version of their acclaimed Internet TV client that streams prerecorded TV shows to the users computer. The new version has one feature in particular that was well overdue. Joost can now be updated from within the client. Users do not have to download and install new versions from the Joost website anymore.

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.

Tags: internet watch tv, internet-tv, joost, tv shows

How much would you pay for one tv show episode ?

Martin — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 20:18:13 +0000

NBC recently tried to raise the price that users had to pay for one tv show episode from $1.99 to $4.99 which was rejected by Apple. NBC then decided to stop offering shows on iTunes and accusations were ping-ponged between both parties.

When I heard the figure $4.99 for the first time I was wondering who came up with it. Who at NBC thought that people would actually buy one episode of a tv show for that amount of money ? If you would buy all episodes of a show which usually has about 12-20 in each season you would pay about $60 – $100 for a season which is way more than buying the season on DVD which offers much more value for a lesser price.

The only advantage of the online purchase is the ability to download the episode earlier which is not a huge advantage if you ask me considering the fact that you can watch it on television as well. (tape it there for instance)

I strongly support that every content owner may assign the prices that he likes for his products. Heck, they could raise that amount to $100 if they want. I would not care because I do not buy music or videos online. I don’t like DRM, I don’t like the fact that I have to burn them – if possible – to be able to view them on my television.

I would say that a price of about $10 for a complete season would be nice. That is my price of course and others might disagree. this amount would be my personal maximum for a full season of a tv show – if I would buy them online, that is.

Back to NBC and Apple. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. My guess is that they will come to an agreement in the end because both probably need each other.

Tags: apple, dvd, episodes, itunes, nbc, seasons, series, tv shows, video

Vid2c another watch commercial videos online website

Martin — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:39:42 +0000

What are you normally doing when you miss an episode of your favorite tv show, no matter if its 24, The Sopranos or Pinky & the Brain ? I know what you are doing. You are looking for a way to view the episode before the next one is aired which can be quite a problem if it is either a daily show, no reruns are in sight or a new show without DVD releases.

There is practically no way to watch that episode again which would really be awful because it would be hard to follow the storyline of the upcoming episode. Vid2c – and others such as Alluc or Peekvid – provide a way to watch those episodes only by creating lists of commercial videos that are available on video portals such as Youtube, Dailymotion and others.

Vid2c offers a wide variety of links in categories such as TV Shows, Movies, Celebs and Anime as well as high quality TV Show, Movie and Music Video links. Clicking on a category leads to a long list of links that are sorted alphabetically. Usually the more popular tv shows got more links and are more likely to have links to all episodes than not so popular shows.

As you can see in the image they have links to almost 19000 tv episodes, 5000 movies and 5000 music videos plus additional links to Asian movies and Anime videos. Some episodes however are divided into several parts which means that 19000 is not the absolute number of tv episodes.

Read More:
Vid2c Homepage
Alluc Homepage
Peekvid Homepage
via Digital Alchemy

Tags: missed episode, tv episodes, tv shows, view tv episode online

Want to watch TV Shows online ? Use TV Links

Martin — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:18:38 +0000

TV Links is a very comprehensive up to date website that offers links to hundreds of TV shows, movies, cartoons, anime, music videos and sport shows. The main url brings you to the listing of all available TV shows which start with all episodes of 24 and end with Zoey 101.

All popular shows like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Star Gate, Star Trek, Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, Criminal Minds, Alias and hundreds more are available with most if not all episodes a mouse click away. One little drawback is that several episodes have subtitles in different languages but the main language is English.

All shows load in a small popup and play immediately at least on my connection. All videos are hosted on the usual video hosting websites such as Youtube, Veoh and Dailymotion. Tv Links is updated frequently with new shows and broken episodes get replaced rather quickly, at least that is the case for the most popular shows.

The cartoons and anime categories hold several hundred TV shows. The same can be said for all the other categories. I think the movie categorie is the one that has most broken links of all categories.

Must be because they can be detected by searching for files above a certain file size only.

Tags: tv links, tv shows, view tv online

List of free movie sites

Martin — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:45:29 +0000

The guy who is running One Tip a day posted a monster list of free tv sites and softwares that make it possible and easy to watch even commercial tv series and live events. Most sites and programs work for users from any country, only a few – like ABC – check the origin of a user and block access if he does not come from the allowed countries.

Most video websites contain the same content with tv shows being the most dominant factor. The mentioned softwares are those well known p2p interfaces that are mainly produced in Asian countries but feature US and European stations as well. It is actually very easy to use them and view live events such as big sport events.

I did not take a look at all the websites that have been mentioned but I would recommend some that have a nice interface or offer the most interesting shows.

ChannelSurfr -great interface, aggregates videos from sites such as dailymotion and youtube.
TV-Video.net – offers videos of well known tv shows such as Lost and Heroes.
WwiTv – Free television stations from around the world

Tags: channelsurfr, free movie sites, tv shows, wwitv

Incredible Video Links Website

Martin — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:48:45 +0000

The following website contains links to 17992 tv show episodes, 5151 cartoon series, 2582 movies, 12235 anime shows, 5741 music videos and 957 sports clips. It is called Alluc and could be described as a link aggregator for video websites. All it does is that it offers the users of the website a opportunity to post new links to videos that they found on various social video websites such as youtube or dailymotion.

Links are added immediately to the database and everyone will be able to search for and use the links to visit the website and view the video. Page navigation is fast and easy to comprehend. Click on a category like TV-shows and all TV-shows are displayed on the next page. It starts in this case with 15 storey high and 30 rock and ends with young Americans. I would estimate that they currently list about 400-500 tv-shows.

A click on a TV-show itself reveals all the – external – links to that TV-show. Alluc always displays a disclaimer before you can leave the website.

Alluc offers some comfortable options. You can display the latest videos that have been added to a category or display the most viewed ones in a category.

Tags: tv shows, video links, watch tv online

Watch hundreds of full tv shows, cartoons and anime

Martin — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:18:32 +0000

TV Links is a site I never heard about before. It has a big listing of many of the most popular tv shows, cartoon & anime series. The site lists the name of the shows and the number of seasons that they link to on their main page. If you click on a link a page with all links to all episodes that are available will load and all that is left to do is click on one of the links to be taken to a website that hosts the movie.

Those websites are either youtube, dailymotion or bolt. To give you an impression, here are some of the tv shows that are listed on that site: 24 all five seasons, friends 6 seasons, one tree hill four seasons plus many additional shows such as desperate housewives, seinfeld, stargate and the office. It could really take weeks to watch all of the movies that are linked from that website.

The links to cartoon and anime shows are likewise huge. To name a few: Southpark, Futurama, Simpsons (all 18 seasons !), Spongebob in the cartoon category and Bleach, Dragonball Z (15 seasons) and GT, Full Metal Alchemist and Naruto in the anime category. Everything is just two clicks away.

source

Tags: movies, tv, tv shows, watch tv online

View thousands of tv shows and episodes online

Martin — Sat, 06 May 2006 07:22:01 +0000

Yes, this is even better than the website that offered about 700 shows. Actually the 700 show website used content from guba.com as a source for their shows, but guba offers more of them. All videos belong to one of eight categories (cartoons, comedy, documentary, drama, foreign, miscellanous, music videos and sports).

Every video has the option to be played in flash or downloaded either for ipod, psp or pc. I´am not sure why they offer them for free, take it while it lasts.

Tags: internet-tv, tv episodes, tv shows

gHacks technology news » tv shows

Watch TV online legally

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