Online TV – Why It’s Good, And How To Get It Free

Thanks to the Internet, media is everywhere. I mean literally, almost everywhere in the world. What Nappster started, everyone is still continuing.

Until a few years ago, if you wanted to get hold of a song of a movie, you had two viable options. Buy, rent, or steal. In recent years, companies like media distributors and studios have cottoned onto the fact that the Internet can be used to safely and legally sell their content.

But that hasn’t slowed the Internet down in it’s progress at all.

Right now, if you want something to watch, you have a plethora of options. Sites like YouTube and Dailymotion have brought us quick and simple ways to share our home-made content, giving rise to video blogs, video podcasts, as well as virals, and semi-professional free movies.

If you want something more professional, like a movie, you can rent it off of iTunes, and watch it on various (Apple-only) media devices.

But one area of the Internet which – I think – shows the most promise is the hallowed IPTV.

That’s Internet Protocol Television – and it’s exactly what it says on the tin – TV, but online. There are various channels who also broadcast live web feeds for their viewers, but this is limited.

No, the next generation of TV will come from services like Joost and LiveStation, which use P2P (Peer-to-Peer) networks to distribute live feeds across the Internet, or provide on-demand downloads.

One of the best upsides to P2P-based TV is that when it lands properly, content producers like TV stations of all kinds will be able to ’seed’, or directly provide a few hundred people, and that feed would be redistributed to other viewers, slashing the cost of getting involved online.

This is nothing short of fantastic. Some people have realised that IPTV is the next big thing, and – aware that many people have no idea what IPTV is, there’s a little-known race emerging to become the standard for IPTV.

That’s because if all of the major providers used one platform, popularity could then take off, and move to new platforms – and let’s not forget, if everyone uses that standard, then people will pay to be a part of that.

Getting it for yourself

There are plenty of IPTV providers out there, but if you really want to get in on the action, there are free services available now. Check out the list of providers I’ve found here, shown in order of potential, promise, and usability:

1. Joost [Free] by far, my favourite. Joost is a well developed platform that works on Windows and Mac, and has a great lineup of content, considering the service is still in its infancy.
2. LiveStation [Free] another service that’s still in beta, but in a web 2.0 world, beta doesn’t mean much. UK based, LiveStation is built on top of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform, and only works with Windows XP SP2 or Vista, a Mac client is ‘in development’ – I wouldn’t hold your breath.
3. SopCast – This is a difficult one. Despite a rather silly name, the SopCast service looks really promising. Again based on P2P, the service offers recording of media, and will handle (apparently) almost any common stream type you can throw at it (asf, wmv, rm, rmvb, mp3). Here’s the killer: it also works with Linux.

There are some great ways to get media online, with IPTV services getting their act together, too. But all in all, I still think that any successful standard would have to be simple, open source, and easy to use. Did I mention free?