The Internet offers several ways to view TV with your computer. Some TV stations offer tv shows on websites, some download clients and media players. Then we have those independent TV clients like Joost, Bablegum and Zattoo plus all those Asian P2P clients that stream TV - most of the time in Chinese - to your computer. And then there is another possibility, local stations. Most of those stations are independent stations that offer their TV program as a stream on their website.

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My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.

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A new version of the Internet TV application Joost has been released yesterday. The first thing that struck me was that I had to uninstall Joost 0.85 before I could install the new Joost version. If that was not bad enough I had to create a new account because Joost changed to a new user system. Signup was hassle free though. There have not been many changes to the system as far as I can tell, one new feature seems to be the so called channel catalog which displays all the channels that can be added to view in Joost.

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Babelgum and Joost are two services that try to deliver tv content to your computer using peer to peer technology. Both services seem to have the same aim to make the transition from watching shows on your television to watching shows on the internet as fluent as possible. There is no configuration involved, all that is needed is the Bablegum or Joost client and a broadband connection to the internet.

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TVU Networks have quietly released a new version of their acclaimed TVU Player which makes it possible to watch many popular tv stations from the internet. You can watch channels such as ESPN, ESPN2, FOX, NBC, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central using TVU Player. It does not deliver the same experience than watching the shows on a big tv though. Due to limited bandwidth the channels look fine if you keep the output window small, if you go fullscreen it becomes pretty blurry.

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