Byte24

bicker

With only minor exception, there is no support for closed captions, online, and therefore, effectively, Internet television violates the intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I wonder if it will remain free after the true cost of presenting it, including applying closed captions, are evident to its distributors.

christyanne

I watch a little bit, but it's a hassle trying to download sometimes, and watching on my monitor instead of a TV kind of sucks.

DTVuser2009

not if you buy a LCD monitor, for some reason LCD HD monitors are $100-less than a comparable LCD HDTV. don't understand how a tuner can add that much but oh well.

At least with a LCD HD Monitor, and free internet TV it might just as well be the real digital television transition. no reliance on reception, and tons more channels, and shows that don't even air on cable/satellite anymore. remember Airwolf?

Aaron62

Free and basically on demand! I've got a hdmi port on my laptop I use to plug into my TV whenever I want to watch a movie and it works great.

DTVuser2009

oh and you can do that too. i never saw a laptop with HDMI yet. (they haven't hit the market here yet, our town is about a year behind new tech, no computer has topped the 160GB hard drive margin yet even though i've heard terabyte many times)

I am getting an Acer Aspire that i can use to download TV shows (and the commercials, the good ones haha) anything from Nickelodeon to HBO if i wanted to. i have what's called Moyea Flash Video Downloader that can download shows before Youtube can do any deleting. i have about 10 years of Nickelodeon from 1982 to 1992 so far and a few other shows from Cartoon network and Hanna Barbera shows, but the 20GB drive in my Compaq Presario is outta disk space. i use them like portable Wi-Fi enabled DVRs.

Then hook them up to my Analog TV via A/V or S-Video and watch them as if i were on cable or satellite.

Casandra

I take it that Internet TV is only for people with very fast connections? I have Fios.

DTVuser2009

we use DSL or Cable. so long as you don't use dial-up you should be fine.

WORD OF CAUTION, those videos hosted on Youku.com suck. their buffering rates are abysmal. currently they use some sort of 'chunk buffering' where only the first 7 minutes are pre-buffered, but sadly it seems to never start again without requiring constant refreshes of the browser and remembering where the progress indicator was. and no solution is 100% successful.

Other Asian sites seem to do fine. i have no problems with Tudou.com hosted videos (even though a great majority of them aren't in english anymore) and Sina seems to be ok.

jhellie_baby

yeah its true internet tv are those with fast connection because i don't find it really comforting watching it from here. i spend most of my time waiting in buffering.

TonyT

Youku = too much buffer for sure. I'm sure it's a strain on their servers for streaming video, but it's just not worth the time or effort right now to watch movies on that site.