Watch Local TV Online with Any TV

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 23, 2008
Updated • Feb 1, 2015
Music and Video
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The Internet offers several ways to view TV with your computer. Some TV stations offer TV shows on websites, some via download clients or media players.

Then we have independent companies that offer 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.

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 shows 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 by 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.

Update: The developers have released a shareware version of their software, and are offering a free version as well. The issue here is that the free version stopped at version 2.63 while the shareware version is already at version 5.1.

I suggest you try the alternatives listed in the first paragraph of this article as they provide excellent value and are free to use. Some may however be limited to some countries only.

Update 2: Any TV has not been updated since 2007 which is a strong indicator that program development has been abandoned.  Check out our online TV guide for alternative options.

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Comments

  1. Anonymous said on August 1, 2010 at 12:43 pm
    Reply

    Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?

  2. Mike J said on August 1, 2010 at 2:58 pm
    Reply

    Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.

    1. Martin said on August 1, 2010 at 3:39 pm
      Reply

      Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.

      1. Mike J said on August 2, 2010 at 2:30 pm
        Reply

        huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
        Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.

  3. myo said on August 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
    Reply

    yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.

  4. Kishore said on August 13, 2010 at 2:55 pm
    Reply

    Error:
    Buidling font Cache pop-up

    Solution:

    Open VLC player.

    On Menu Bar:

    Tools
    Preferences

    (at bottom – left side)
    Show settings — ALL

    Open: Video
    Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
    Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”

    Save
    Exit

    Re-open – done.
    Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts

    Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc

    1. Martin said on August 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
      Reply

      Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.

  5. javier said on August 14, 2010 at 1:50 pm
    Reply

    @Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
    I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.

    Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?

    I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…

    /thanks
    /j

  6. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,

  7. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.

    No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure

  8. Ted said on October 22, 2010 at 3:57 am
    Reply

    Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me

  9. Evan said on December 8, 2013 at 1:48 am
    Reply

    I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).

  10. Mike Williams said on September 6, 2023 at 1:26 pm
    Reply

    Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?

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