Intro
Thanks to the large storm cell that went through the midwest on Thursday, basically every TV show that my TiVo recorded off the major networks during primetime was useless. I would guess I got about 10% TV shows, 90% weather coverage.
But I’ve got two nice internet connections (6Mbps at home, dual T1s at work) so I decided to try out the streaming services that the major networks are now offering on their websites. The last time I had this problem almost no TV shows had an official way of viewing them. You’d have to just use a torrent. But that’s changed.
CBS
I just finished watching Thursday’s episode of CSI using their episode viewer. There were noticeable framerate problems during the show. It basically looked like portions of the show were missing frames, purposely. My guess is that it’s an encoding issue as my computer had plenty of extra CPU head room so I doubt that to be the problem. Other than that (which is kind of minor, but if common could effect more action oriented shows like Survivor quite a bit), the video was very nice looking.
The site it’s self is easy enough to navigate. The video plays simply in the web page, using a flash player that looks quite a bit like the YouTube player. Commercials are short (just one commercial per commercial break), and embedded straight into the video. This is quite nice. When paused, the video simply pauses and nothing odd happens (keep reading for why I mentioned this). You can watch either in the native size, or fullscreen. The problem here (which is minor) is that when put into full screen, it stretches up the 4:3 size of the player. Yet the content is widescreen, thus putting black bars that are unnecessary on my widescreen monitor all around the video.
ABC
Using ABC’s service I watch both Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy. ABC’s service is the one I liked the least. The biggest problem for me was the commercials and pausing the video. When you pause the video, it becomes a much smaller version of it’s self and moves off to the side so the whole window can be used for an ad. When unpaused, things go back to the way they were.
The commercials are either videos or little flash files. The problem is that the video stops, and this ad shows up instead. When the ad is over (you are forced to wait 30 seconds), the ad doesn’t go away. The program doesn’t continue. You have to click the continue button. This means you can’t just watch the show, you must interact. Where I watched CSI on my TV using the VGA port, I wouldn’t be able to do this with the ABC shows because I would have to get up and click the little button every 10-15 minutes. On the plus side they offer four sizes for the video (small, normal, large, and fullscreen).
The player is a big flash window, which sucks up extra CPU that it doesn’t need. It’s all animated and nice looking, wasting cycles on pointless transition effects (that could be trivially accelerated with 3D processing, which flash has access to). The video looks great though, I have no complaints in that department. I just wish they’d fix the player. I’m not sure if it is flash though, as it required a little plugin to be installed (some custom thing).
NBC
The system NBC uses is pretty nice. It’s not hard to use, and once the video starts playing the screen more or less clears of clutter making things a bit easier to watch. I used it to watch The Office, Scrubs, and My Name Is Earl. The video quality was great, I didn’t notice any problems. Yet not every NBC show is available: notably ER. Since the episode isn’t being rerun on my local station (as far as I can tell) and isn’t available online (legally), I just won’t get to see it until it reruns later in the year or in syndication.
My favorite thing about the NBC system is one that will probably be fixed. When your show first starts or during commercials, you are shown an ad video. At least I think that is what is supposed to happen. You see on my Mac those videos didn’t play… at all. Yet after that was over (30s) the video would start back up. This meant that it was commercial free for me. Now whether this was a Mac thing or a Safari thing, I don’t know. But it was nice.
It Works With A Mac!
The best part of all this is that it works with a Mac. No Windows Media Player nuttiness. No “you must install Silverlight”. They all worked on my Mac. It’s nice to see that. So many people just ignore Apple users or cop out and say “get Parallels.”
None of the services were bad, they were all quite usable. That’s a good thing, since we’re entering severe weather season and I’ll probably get to use them again.
Maybe I’ll get to checkout Fox or The CW next time.
