Online TV services
April 15, 2008 2:14 AM 
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Looking for good implementations of web based, on demand television, similar to BBC's iPlayer and Channel 4's 4OD services.
Great hive mind,
Currently doing some research into IPTV and web based television services. Trying to get examples of services similar to BBC's
iPlayer and well designed video on demand sites like
Hulu and the new
South Park site. I'm based in Ireland, so there are probably loads of US sites that I don't even know about. Let me know your favourites. Forgeign language sites are more than welcome too.
Thanks, as always.
posted by ReiToei to computers & internet (4 comments total)
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A new service that looks to have great promise is Livestation. It's in beta and they're doing a Gmail style "invite a friend" thing so send me a mefi mail with your email address if you want an invite. They're mainly concentrating on news for now because it tends to be easier to get broadcast rights. What you get depends on where you are. We don't get much here in the US, only Al Jazeera and France24 but in Europe you also get BBC World, EuroNews, Sky TV and Bloomberg. They say more is coming soon.
In Europe (I'm not sure about Ireland) there is Zattoo which is similar to Livestation but has been around longer and has more channels.
You can often get CNN International as a Windows Media stream directly from cnn.com.
Russia Today is another English language broadcaster with a live stream which I find interesting sometimes.
There are lots of directory type sites listing free streams. Many look a bit dubious in the sense that I think they might exist more for the Google ad revenue than anything more useful. A few that I have found useful are TOMA, Streamick, Channel Chooser. Many of the links on those sort of sites are out of date and don't work but it can be fun to play around and see what you get. Some of the streams are clearly not supposed to be available. e.g, one of them has a working stream for BBC News 24 which is not supposed to be seen outside the UK. I suspect that someone somewhere has forgotten to secure them properly so they tend to come and go as people discover them, then the broadcaster notices the increased bandwidth and shuts them down.
Warning: This sort of service or software for sale appears to be pretty much a scam or a wild exaggeration at best. I think they're basically the same directories as the free sites I quoted above perhaps with some sort of player. There is no way in the world that the results anywhere near as reliable or predicable as the page suggests. It's easy to find lots of similar sites full of the same rosy looking BS.
posted by tetranz at 3:31 AM on April 15, 2008