Online video a true alternative to regular TV

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 27 November 2006 20:56

Your IT - Entertainment

Moves by Apple with the iTunes store, and Microsoft with the Xbox 360 video download service, are trying to blunt the never ending advance of pirate TV and movie content by making them easy to access, easy to purchase, and easy to watch.

With iTunes, shows can be watched on a computer screen, or on an iPod, with Apple’s iTV device to make watching downloaded content easy on a regular TV set.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video download service doesn’t yet allow transfer of video content to the Zune or other portable media player, but could easily offer this service in the future. And as most Xbox 360s are already hooked up to a TV, and often an HDTV, watching downloaded video content from your Xbox 360 is a no-brainer.

The big problem with much of today’s online TV is the poor quality of the picture. While some video is recorded on mobile phones and then sent to Youtube or other sites, more and more semi-professional and professional works are appearing on some of these sites.

BitTorrent TV shows are said to often be recordings from HD broadcasts, with video quality much better than that experienced on most Youtube video clips.

The TV show downloads from online services that run on the iPod or on a computer often have either only adequate picture quality or can only be played on a computer screen (unless you plug your computer into a compatible large screen TV).

At least with the Xbox 360, the possibility of legally downloading a range of HDTV programming is available to US users.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s more video online than ever before, and the ever widening spread of broadband at ever faster speeds makes watching and enjoying online video content a far more rewarding experience.

What will you be watching tonight, something on TV, or something from the Internet?