It is more a convenience than something revolutionary because programs and websites that do the same already exist for some time. The biggest advantage of RevoluTV is the no frills no thrills interface that is clean and easily accessible. It makes use of Windows Media Player to stream the TV contents to the computer screen which unfortunately means that the software program will only run on computers with Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Channels are divided into themes like News, Games or Kids which list the available TV streams. A click on a network name will load the channel immediately which works well and without lags. It usually takes a few seconds to buffer the stream before a picture is shown.

Playback quality depends a lot on the user’s Internet connection but also on the type of backbone the TV network is using to stream their contents.

Channels can be added to favorites for faster access. There is however no settings menu of any kind. Basic controls for volume and playback are offered but nothing beyond that. The only way to change settings would probably be to change them in Windows Media Player.

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Any TV is a client that pulls a list of available channels from a server and makes them available in the client. You should not expect top TV series or movies but you can find interesting channels none the less. Besides lots of local news stations plus CNN and some global ones you find a wide variety of channels that you can sort after country of origin.

There are a lot of channels from the United States and the listing is divided into several folders. They are sorted by state and by alphabet. Quality depends largely on the tv station or network but can be compared to other clients, it’s definitely better for most stations than Youtube quality for instance.

Any Tv offers Radio Stations and Video Clips as well. I do prefer Shoutcast for the first though and video portals or Miro for the second.

via Download Squad

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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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I can’t see many changes in this version. TVU Networks are unfortunately not publishing release notes so I have to compare the old and new version by myself. The only change that I was able to find is a link to the program of that network that you could click on. Some stations are not there for the moment, I’m missing ABC for instance.

If you run into errors with TVU Player you should take a look at my tvu player faq which addresses some of the most common problems that are encountered. Please note that you do need a broadband connection for most channels, only the channels marked with low could probably be viewed without one.

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