Tonight I stumbled upon something extremely cool... something I had hoped would be available
to those of us using the 700w with unlimited bandwidth... live video streaming TV.
I found it by going to an IE bookmark to windowsmedia.com -- right at the top is a link for
"Watch Live TV" (smartvideo.com) -- I clicked it and set up a free 7-day account and within
a few minutes later I was watching live streaming MSNBC TV. It wasn't that great, so I
checked out the "Settings" link buried at the bottom of the page. There it had the option to
switch it from the default "low speed" to "high speed" -- then I watched the MSNBC stream
again and *WOW* -- the video and audio were incredible!!! I even had it playing while
driving around town just to see if it would stay going... it did... for a long time!
Unfortunately they only have a few live video streams... MSNBC and CNBC. The rest are "on
demand" (i.e. canned) videos--not that impressive.
The problems with this particular service is that they only have a few live video streams,
the setting "low speed" is always the default (you have to change it every time you fire up
the app), and they charge $13/mo for it. For me, I'd be happy to pay $13/mo if I got more
live channels... not just these two. It's cool, but not $13/mo cool.
I surfed around the net and couldn't find what I was looking for... maybe it doesn't exist?
I'm surprised iTunes or a big company like TimeWarner or COX isn't providing a streaming
service like this to paying customers. Heck, XM and Sirius are with their commercial
satellite radio programming, and VZW is doing it with their VCast crap, so why isn't this
available for those who have converged?
Check out orb.com for a *free* streaming media solution. You install their software on your
desktop computer (preferably one with a TV tuner card) and then it streams your
audio/video/live TV/internet TV/webcams/pics/Outlook contacts/etc all to your 700w for free.
Amazing. I love being able to watch live local TV or check my webcam from the road. Now they
just need to fix the problems with audio playlists only playing one track, and get Palm/MS
to address the Media Player backlight bug. Obviously bandwidth is key, but I also think I
get smoother video streaming using Xcpuscalar cranked up to 520 MHz.
One of the reasons I chose the 700w was to eventually pair it up with a Slingbox (which is
still pretty damn sweet hooked up to your DVR) once the WM5 client came out, but now with
Orb I think I'll wait on that purchase!
The next streaming application I'm waiting on is Pandora, but I think we'll need Macromedia
to release a new version of Flash for that to be compatible. Either that or the guys at
pandora.com need to figure out a way to stream their audio to our treos without using Flash.
Mike from
<a href="http://telewizja-przez-internet.porywacze.com"><b>Telewizja przez internet</b></a>
