IPTV vs. Internet TV: The Winner Is... (Part 1)
Late-night comedian Conan O'Brien was right on target when he put our social video and IPTV craze into perspective by saying, well, watch his video and hear it from him.
Conan O’Brien’s Classic Line
Hey Honey, What's On?
Seriously, are you watching TV on your PC? Wait a minute -- you're saying you don't know about the dozens of IPTV and Internet sites that let you watch I Love Lucy reruns online? Oh, dear, you're missing out on dozens of shows -- and one big time killer.
Better than that, viewing TV online gives you the perfect excuse to buy a big monitor. No, I'm serious. Our Test Center just put a batch of 30-inch monitors to the test. Read the results in "Top 30-Inch LCD Monitors" (click on Full Review by each listing for more details).A 30-incher would be too much with my dual-monitor setup, so I'm sticking with my 23-inch ViewSonic vp2330wb. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than any of the mine-is-bigger-than- yours monitors, and movies and Internet TV look terrific on it.
IPTV or Internet TV?
In the simplest terms, IPTV (Internet Protocol-based TV) is a collection of proprietary TV systems delivered to you by way of IP-based channels on the Internet and supported by industry heavies like Microsoft. It may be free or you may have to pay for it; you watch it using a viewer supplied by an IPTV company such as Joost (see Joost TV Open for Business) or Zattoo.
PC World Contributing Editor Dan Tynan gives you an in-depth explanation of IPTV in "TV Your Way." And if you want to see your eyes glaze over, try reading Robin Good's treatise on the subject.
The opposite of IPTV's closed network approach is Internet TV. The content you view is over the public Internet. One problem is that it's slower than IPTV and relies on viewers such as Microsoft Windows Media Player and RealNetworks' RealPlayer.
Who’s the winner? You can decide by trying a collection of almost 20 TV sites, coming in Monday’s blog.
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O'Brien's line is "on the money" funny -- a lot (a LOT!) of what passes for internet TV exists almost exclusively for novelty value. Fox's "25th hour of 24" (in which Jack finally gets to sleep, then discovers his night light uses an incandescent bulb) falls squarely in this category.
However, as a means of delivering hard-to-find content on demand, the internet is hard to beat. For example, www.archive.org offers a huge variety of rare, quirky or just plain unusual films, both for streaming and for download, ranging from obscure training films to all-but-forgotten cartoons all the way to movies -- shorts, serials and features -- from the "classic" era. Virtually all of these play on freely-available viewers, and many can be burned to disc for playback on many DVD players.
Another good (and free) choice, which comes as part of the package with the free Winamp media player (www.winamp.com), is AOL's In2TV. Winamp runs on any version of Windows from 98 on up (including Vista)
(continued) Winamp runs on any version of Windows from 98 on up (including Vista) and can play a variety of video (as well as audio) formats, but the kicker is that it grants access to AOL's In2TV without requiring registration even on those older machines. In my house, "Max Headroom" and "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." are big In2TV hits, but shows like the "Gilligan's Island" unaired pilot episode and the "Godzilla" pantheon are popular as well. And where else can you watch the entire "Johnny Quest" series, on demand, for free? (And on a pre-Y2K laptop?!?)