Today things are a lot better for tv junkies. If you miss your favorite show you have a good chance to find it online available at an official site or if you are really desperate as a stream or download on third party sites.

Remember to Watch offers an online service for people who want to make sure not to miss a tv show when it airs. The service is limited to US television shows and can either email your or send you an SMS to remind you that your favorite tv show is about to air.

The homepage displays a list of upcoming tv shows. Each show is displayed with its name, tags, the time it airs and two links to subscribe to reminders. Here it is possible to subscribe to a single episode or all future episodes of that particular show.

You can only subscribe to tv shows and events if you have an account. Registration is free and should not take more than a minute. Email notifications are enabled by default. A mobile phone number needs to be entered before mobile phone notifications become available.

All subscribed to tv shows are displayed in the members area after log in as well. Here it is then possible to unsubscribe or change settings like the alert time which can be changed from 30 minutes to 15 or 60 minutes. This is the time that you receive notifications about an upcoming tv show.

Many popular shows are available for selection. while you find lots of tv shows there it is likely that you won’t find all listed.

Remember To Watch nevertheless is an interesting service for users who need a reminder every now and then to watch their favorite tv show. This obviously works best if they are near a tv. One of the uses could be to act as a “end work for the day” reminder if the tv show happens to air in the afternoon / evening.

You can try out Remember to Watch at the official service website.

Samsung are defining themselves as one of the better TV manufacturers out there, with their Smart TV range delivering not only superb performance, but also excellent versatility. See, a TV isn’t just a box to show pictures anymore, and Samsung know this. Rather, it is an important part of a fully integrated entertainment experience and, because of this, Samsung have created a TV that not only displays pretty pictures – and they are very pretty – but also provides a host of connectivity options.

The Samsung Smart TV UA40D5500RR (or D5500 for short) is a beautifully constructed, very thin 40 inch LED TV that delivers awesome clarity and contrast, along with bright colours. It supports a host of added extras, including wireless LAN support and the ability to play media via its USB ports.

One complaint that we can level at this otherwise wonderful TV are the inputs. It features four HDMI inputs, 2 USB ports, a LAN port, headphone jack, antenna input, and a number of audio in and out options. That’s a good list (particularly the HDMI ports.) But the still necessary component cable ports are conspicuously absent. The solution is to supply a specialised interface cable… but although this comes with the unit, it cuts down component cable use to one item. Now, realistically, anyone in their right mind should be using HDMI for… well, everything, but there are still older devices that use component cables only. And we found the performance of the D5500’s component cable converter to be disappointing.

But that’s about it. Everything else, with regards to this TV, was great. OK, it’s not a 3D model, but we’re still a little unconvinced about home 3D viewing (or any 3D viewing, for that matter.) Sure, if you’re after a 3D TV, you’ll probably look elsewhere, but undecided users who don’t think that 3D is a ‘must have it or die’ aspect to a TV need look no further.

The extremely user-friendly device is really top notch. It would be difficult to choose another TV over it, except for almost purely cosmetic reasons (like the fact that it has a very shiny screen that reflects light easily and really is a pain to keep clean) or based on its inputs. Price might be an issue too… it’s not the cheapest TV around, but good quality LED TVs cost more than poorer models.

In short, it is a beautifully constructed TV that has a good, solid base, great remote functions and performs excellently. The decision to buy it or not may only come down to a silly reason like brand loyalty, but there are worse brands to support than Samsung. And if you’re still on the fence, a quick demonstration of its excellent picture quality alone will probably make your decision for you.

Verdict:

A great TV, particularly if you’re not after a 3D option

Pros:

• Excellent picture
• Extra functionality
• 4 HDMI ports

CONS:

• Shiny
• Expensive
• Component ports lacking

Buy

You can buy the Samsung D5500 TV in many online stores, including Amazon.

Movie studio 20th Century Fox are counting on this as it’s now been announced that the next Angry Birds game, called Angry Birds RIO, will tie-in with an animated cartoon movie.

The film, which is due for release in March will be made by the same people behind the popular Ice Age.  A spokesman for 20th Century Fox said the movie would ”introduce the millions of fans of Angry Birds to the exciting world of RIO.”

In the new game the birds travel to Brazil to try and rescue two new friends, Blue and Jewel.  They are tropical birds who will be the main stars of the movie.

The Angry Birds game has had over 50 million downloads since its release last year.  It can now been found on just about every smartphone platform and is set for release on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

The game, apparently ‘cos this is news to me too, is about some bad tempered birds (okay, I could have figured this bit out) who try to rescue their eggs from evil pigs.  Using a slingshot the birds are catapulted into the different structures where the pigs are hiding and can use their unique skills to defeat them.

There have also been rumours of an Angry Birds TV Series…  I can’t wait.

The prize fund on the night will be $1m, though it’s unclear at this time what the computer would spend it on if it won.

The contest is the first since 1997 when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue took on chess master Garry Kasparov and defeated him.

IBM have decided on the move to field test the new artificial intelligence unit in the machine.  ”The big challenge we see here is helping people really appreciate the power and limits of the technology we are developing with Watson,” Dr David Ferrucci, IBM’s chief scientist of Watson computing told BBC News.

Watson, which was named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson, aims to mimic human intelligence by “deciphering and answering questions without being connected to the Internet”, which already gives it one plus over the rest of us!

It will be interesting to see how well the computer performs understanding natural language and conversing with the gameshow’s host.

Jeopardy is seen as the ultimate challenge in the artificial intelligence world because the game’s clues involve analysing subtle meanings, irony, riddles and other complexities where humans excel and machines do not.  Dr Ferrucci said the tough part for Watson is that it has to “know what it knows with utmost confidence”.

Watson is busy preparing for the big event by practicing against former Jeopardy winners.  So far it has played 55 games though IBM is keeping quiet about how well it is doing.

The guys over at Stuff We Like have posted a video demonstration of Google TV that was recorded at Comic Con 2010. It shows a demo of Google TV by two Google engineers.

Google TV combines the TV, DVR recordings and the Internet in a seamless experience. It comes as a set top box, and will also be included in some TVs directly.

One of the strongest features of Google TV is its search capabilities that allows the user to find channels, individual shows and recordings faster.

Google TV comes with a built-in Chrome web browser, which supports everything that the computer version does. If it works in the normal Chrome browser, it will work on Google TV as well.

This opens a slew of new options that most set top boxes and TVs do not offer, like playing Flash games, accessing websites like Facebook, watching Youtube videos, or checking life stats or chatting with your buddies while watching the latest game of your favorite team.

This compatibility with the web also means that Google TV will offer to multimedia contents like music, photos, favorite games and everything that is available on the Internet these days.

Google TV runs on the Android platform, and will integrated Google Chrome and Adobe’s Flash Player. The idea is to provide manufacturers with a flexible operating system that they can not only add to their TVs, but also Blu-Ray players, DVD players, gaming systems and other set top boxes.

Since it is based on Android, Google TV is able to run any Android app, providing that it does not rely on phone hardware to run.

All Google TV devices will come with a remote that makes use of a QWERTY keyboard, and it is furthermore possible to use an Android phone as a remote as well. It is likely that different types of input devices will become available eventually, from bare bones systems to full keyboards.

Engadget posted some of the hardware stats a while ago:

Google’s laid out a series of baseline hardware specifications for the Google TV platform, which every piece of gear will share. The heart of the system is the Intel Atom CE4100, which launched at IDF last year. It’s an Atom-based SoC with some additional silicon for decoding dual 1080p video stream, MPEG-4 support, and 3D graphics capabilities. That’s joined by some custom DSPs, and things like WiFi, HDMI, and Bluetooth are all required.

Sony seems to be the first TV manufacturer to bring out a Google TV later this year. It will be interesting to see how effective this is in real life, how much it costs, and when it will become available in other countries than the US. (more information: Stuff We Like, Download Squad, Engadget official site)

The television is sold in different sizes (as usual) including 46″ and 55″ with all models sharing the same feature set which includes energy efficient backlighting (lead and mercury free, energy star compliant), 1920×1200 Full HD support, 120 Hz Auto Motion Plus refresh rate and Internet connectivity.

The ultra slim design of the LED 7000 makes it an ideal candidate for a wall mount. Only one screw needed to mount the TV which makes the process easier and more efficient. A wireless or wired connection is available to connect the television to the network and the Internet. It can display widgets on screen that can display news or websites. Not sure if that is a killer feature but it might come in handy in certain situations.

What makes me consider buying the TV is the energy efficiency, the image quality and the wall mounting capability.

Which TV would you buy if you could select one?

Anime is a form of Japanese animation that is primarily directed to an older audience. It has a large fan following and some of the shows actually have a pretty well developed storyline. The only downside is that anime is available only a few select television channels.

For anime fans who cannot get a fix of their favorite show on TV, the internet offers hope. Just like TV shows, most anime is also uploaded to online video-sharing sites. It can be quite irksome to search for a single show or episode though. Thankfully, Crawlanime does all the hard work for you.

Crawlanime is an indexing site for anime. The site has a pretty comprehensive list of anime videos all over the internet. The site lists anime in decreasing order of available videos. This means shows with the highest number of videos are displayed first. If you’re looking for something specific though, you can always use the index on the left side of the page.

Clicking on a show opens up a page with all the available episodes. Once you select an episode, a new page opens up, with the links. The initial links all go to Veoh, which are usually the 5-minute previews and require you to have VeohTv to watch them. But if you scroll down, you will come to links from other video-sharing sites, most notably YouTube and Dailymotion.

Crawlanime provides hours of entertainment, especially if you’re into anime. I’d like to see the site have a small stat counter that tells people which are the most viewed videos. That way, new users can check out popular shows and decide if it’s for them.

What do you think of Crawlanime? Do you know of any other anime indexing sites? How do you think the availability of anime online affects broadcasters and TV channels? Let me know in the comments.

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.

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.

Insufficient bandwidth means that there is not enough bandwidth available to transport all the date from the Zattoo server to the client PC. The effect is a distorted pictures from time to time that is showing artifacts and interrupted sounds.

The major problem with this error message is that you cannot change the quality settings currently in Zattoo. It sometimes helps to switch the channel for a few seconds and go back to the channel that did display the insufficient bandwidth message. It happened more than once that the message will not appear again. That’s unfortunately the only fix that I was able to find for this problem.

Zattoo is currently available in many different countries in Europe including Germany, England, France and Switzerland.

They made it clear in their announcement that they expect that some things will go wrong, obviously live is something completely different than the prerecorded shows that they use to stream normally.

I’m not sure about this but I guess you need the latest client that was released yesterday to be able to take part in the live test. I definitely will tune in to see how the image quality will hold up against other services that stream live Internet. Another aspect that is quite interesting is the delay of the image compared to normal television. How many seconds will the stream be behind in the coverage ?

Amazon and Yahoo are just two of the websites that offer premieres on their websites. As usual this content is only available to viewers of certain areas, probably only to viewers with an IP from the United States. All others rely as usual on P2P and Usenet to grab the episodes from there.

If you are from the United States you can go to Yahoo and view Aliens in America as well as Friday Night Lights until September 30th when they are replaced by Dexter, Life is Wild and Brotherhood.

Amazon is currently offering season premieres of Bones, Rules of Engagement, Til Death, House and Big Bang Theory. Amazon Unbox is only available to customers from the United States as well.

Read More:

Yahoo TV premieres
Amazon Unbox premieres

All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it – well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.

Down and Dirty is a Rock, Metal, Pop and Punk channel with videos from acts like Sum41, Korn and Everclear. This are not (!) music videos but some mix of music, interviews and other elements.

I especially like the R-rated movie section called Reel Junkies which is really enjoyable. You do find videos with many celebrities on No Good TV showing the Celebs from their “bad” sides. Great if you like this kind of stuff.

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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The next step would be to create an account at mycast.orb.com. When that is done you can start configuring the service at the server. Right-click the icon that should appear in the system tray and select Configuration. Select the media tab and add folders of videos, music, photos and documents that you want to access with another internet device. You may add other users who are allowed to view your media files.

Once everything is setup you simply open the mycast.orb.com website and login. After that you can browse the contents that the server streams and view it on the other device. A real simple but effective system. I was able to view movies using my Wii that way. You can also stream tv if you have a video card that supports it. I don’t think it makes that much sense to stream tv to my wii but it would be nice if you are using a notebook for instance.

Take a look at the following youtube video which demonstrates orb used by a Nintendo Wii.

Please note that you need a broadband connection to do this kind of things. Some folders are automatically added (my documents). If you do not want this make sure to remove them from the configurations menu.

Sopcast is an alternative. You can download the freeware from the developers website or use one of the mirrors to do so. The download from the main website did not work for me, not a good sign, and I had to use one of the mirrors to get the program. Sopcast offers free tv streams over internet using P2P technique which means that the quality not only depends on the source who is streaming the tv signal but also on the peers that share their bandwidth as well.

A pleasant suprise was that the website was completely translated to English, which is not the case for most other Sopcast-like-tools out there. Once installed you can login anonymously and click on channels to see the big channel list.

Channels are sorted into categories like Sports and HiFi Music. As you can see on the picture to the left there are some characters that are not displayed correctly, most likely because of missing Chinese language support on my system.

Clicking on a channel opens a new window to the right of the program that is connected to it. You receive some basic information about buffering, speed and which program you are viewing.

It normally takes some time to load. Just remember that the quality of the output not only depends on your connection speed but also on the connection speed of your peers.

The tv stream playback began quickly but the buffering was not done yet. It is normal to get some small interruptions during the first minutes of playback. This should stop once you are connected to more peers.

Sopcast does not have that many US channels like TVU Player. It offers ESPN, HBO Movie and CNN. There are probably more at different times in the day and some minor ones that I missed but it’s rather mediocre.

All the football fans should also take note of CCTV 5 which is a Chinese Sports channel broadcasting lots of European football. (that is soccer in North America)

Conclusion: If you like sports you may want to try out Sopcast and won’t miss tvu player that much. If you like movies and tv shows sopcast is not really the right tv streaming application to use.

This is basically a collection of free streams that are available on the internet and can’t be compared to programs like tvu player that stream popular tv channels like ABC, Comedy Central and FOX. The only advantage you get with streamick is that it displays the streams directly from within their website.

To be honest, many channels that are offered at their website are crap. Local channels about Miami or New Orleans don’t appeal to a world wide audience. Neither do many of the other channels offered there Boardriders TV and High TV for example.

My suggestion would be to give it a try, take a look at the offered streams and see if they offer any that might be of interest to you.

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

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.

They have also added a forum where everyone can discuss the series and read the announcements when new episodes are released. The following excerpt was taken from Wikipedia “Arrested Development is a character-driven Emmy Award-winning American comedy television series that ran from November 2, 2003 to February 10, 2006, about a formerly wealthy and habitually dysfunctional family. The series is presented in a fashion reminiscent of documentary film/cinéma vérité, with omniscient narration (by Ron Howard), archival photographs, and historic footage. Although set in Newport Beach and Balboa Island, California, it was primarily filmed in locations around Culver City and Marina del Rey, about an hour drive north.”