Watch Online Television

The Internet is changing the world. For many people the computer becomes the main source through which they read books, listen to music or watch a movie. Recently the development of the technology brought to us a new way for entertainment and study (a lot of educational materials now are in a video format), the Internet television. Streaming video or video on demand, the Internet television opened new horizons for companies and individuals and brought more value at less cost for the consumer and the developer. The advantages of the online television are many and just to name few we could mention the convenience to watch what we want, when we want it and to have more channels and shows to choose from at no cost or at a low cost. The Internet television has also made possible the professional existence of one-man-shows and very niche channels that would otherwise see no daylight.
In the following few lines we will review three of the top websites that make it possible for you to watch your favored show and television program or your favored sport event.
HULU
Hulu offers streaming video of television shows, movies and other content from many networks such as NBC, Fox, and ABC etc. The content they broadcast is supported by commercials. The broadcasting at the moment is only available to users from the United States. Hulu started operations in March 2008. You can watch HULU on your TV by connecting a computer that has a streaming capable video card to the TV via Hdmi or RCA connector. The companies that created HULU are NBC Universal News Corp. and ABC Inc. The funding was provided by Providence Equity Partners that received a 10 percent stake in for their 100 millon dollar investment.
Blip.TV – the next generation television network
This is another Internet video website that has a slightly different concept. The website’s main focus is on content generated by its users, mainly independent short shows. The website exists since 2005, as it proudly says on its home page.
Blip.tv is a great place to find something unique and to enjoy it. The content crated by independent authors is great. Blip.tv is a perfect example of what we already discussed about the internet television and the opportunity it creates for individuals. The founders of blip.tv are Mike Hudack, Dina Kaplan, Justin Day, Jared Klett and Charles Hope. Blip.tv has very generous advertising model and splits the revenue 50/50 between themselves and the content producers. Another interesting fact is that the users of the service are able to opt in and out of the advertisements whenever they like. Certainly blip.tv is a very interesting project. According to this “Comparison to video services” table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_services), blip.tv is the only one with opt in / opt out advertisement.
Joost
This is another famous online video service that was founded by the creators of Skype. This interesting here is that they started using P2P TV technology. In December 2008 they discontinued the support of their application and moved to a website-only model. By the end of 2009 Adconition Media Group announced that they are purchasing the assets of Joost.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 3:49 am and is filed under Tv Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.