There are several ways to watch TV online these days and on this site I’ll be explaining the various ways in which to achieve this, as well as the pros and cons of each option. Anyway, let’s get started with the easiest…
Official Web Players
Whether you live in the USA, UK, and Germany or anywhere in the world for that matter, most of the major TV broadcasters from your region or country will have an internet based web player that will allow you to watch live and catch-up content online. Some examples players are the BBC’s iPlayer in the UK, or Hulu in the USA, which is a joint venture between some of the biggest US networks such as Fox, NBC, ABC etc.
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Web players have by far the best video quality and some broadcasters even show programs in HD (connection permitted). They also have the latest programs to catch-up on and many show major live sporting events like The Olympics or The World Cup for free. To help pay for the content and video bandwidth bills, most providers will place adverts throughout the programs on offer.
These web base players generally only work in their designated country though, so if you were to try and watch say Hulu anywhere other than in the US, your computer IP will be recognized as international, and you will not be able to stream any content (There is a walk around this limitation, read my “how to” here).
Pros – Excellent video quality, large library of content, reliable.
Cons – Only works in target country, shows adverts.
P2PTV Software
There are several free P2PTV software clients available that let you watch TV on your computer. Sopcast, PPLive, PPMate etc to name but a few. These all use a technology called p2p (peer to peer) which essentially means everyone who is watching a particular channel becomes part of that video stream distribution network, and some of you internet connection will be used to “pass” the stream to the next person so they can watch. It very much like p2p file sharing only with streaming media instead.
The quality of these streams are based on a few factor including how good the source content is being encoded, how fast the encoders connection speed is for transmitting and how many leeches there are on the channel (people who don’t allow their connection to be used to distribute the stream) as this slows the overall p2p network performance.
Unlike the web players, there is usually no schedule so it can be very hit and miss finding what you want to watch. There are specialized websites that do show schedules for sports such as gigstreams.com but I have yet to find a similar website showing general TV listings for the most popular P2PTV programs.
Pros – Live TV, lots of sports channels.
Cons – Poor video quality, slow, unreliable, limited programs, many channels Chinese only.