Layla and I have tried out two IPTV services this weekend.
- Internet TV Beta in Windows Media Center is surprisingly cool. The beta opened up on Thursday to Vista Ultimate and Home Premium customers in the US, and everyone running those SKUs now magically have an "Internet TV" option on their MCE interfaces.
The service works really well and (most importantly) is streamable from my Vista machine directly to my Media Center Extender—the Xbox 360. For those of us who don't have a machine in the living room, this is absolutely killer.
The only downside so far is a lack of full-length programming content: they've got all three seasons of Arrested Development, and a handful of other shows. However, there are also easily 1,000+ short clips from the History Channel and so forth. Absolutely great stuff—if a bit short. I hope to see this improve once the program exits beta.
The service is funded by advertising—it's one commercial before every on-demand clip, and one for each commercial break during a real show. As an added bonus, the UI automatically selects (via title keyword matching, I think) another clip to play immediately after your selection (and sans the ad).
- Netflix's Instant Viewing is the other service, which works great if you've got a computer in the living room. We typically don't, but hauled out the Alienware to give it a shot.
The first snag we hit is that the software requires 3GB of free disk space on your system drive before it will start. This machine has a big drive in it (160GB?) but I've got four operating systems installed and had to uninstall a bunch of junk on my current installation before the movies would begin downloading. If I could configure it to cache to another drive, I would have been fine—but I couldn't. Poor design.
Otherwise, the selection was good (not "great"). This service is funded by my subscription fees, so I only get 17 hours of viewing each month. This will work great until I hit that point—and if I want to watch more, I suspect I'm screwed. At that point, watching bumper ads (even a bunch of them) would be more than worth it for a full film.
I tried Joost a while ago, but the programming was entirely suited to me, which means it's completely unsuitable for anyone with any sophistication, like Layla. Plus, it doesn't stream to the 360, which makes it somewhat inconvenient.
I'm really excited about the Media Center offering, mostly because it works without hauling a computer into the living room, but also because it doesn't limit me to 17 hours each month. I doubt I'd use that much...but who knows. Maybe they'll feature old episodes of Top Gear or something.
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