14 DAY TRIAL // Being away from home or simply not having access to the television set because of the addictedness of your wife for soap operas, makes you think about other alternatives for watching your favorite program. Why bother friends, neighbors or going to a bar while you can sit and relax at the computer desk watching your show? Yes, you can watch television right on your computer screen just taking advantage of the latest streaming solutions provided by the TV networks. No cable or TV Tuner required, just your PC connected to the Internet (preferable a broadband connection). It means that you will play live or recorded streams of the TV shows that are available online. Digital television is evolving rapidly and live streaming is one important step in this process.
To watch a live Internet broadcast of a TV station you need to access the station's website and look for the live streaming link. By clicking it, you will be able to play the live content using Mediaplayer or Real Player. To avoid loading problems of the websites or losing time looking for the live stream link, programmers thought it would be easier to design applications that have already included and sorted the desired links. So they created Internet TV applications that contain lists with live streams of TV stations, recorded materials or webcam streams which are one click away to be played. No need to search for the links, just launch the program and choose the station from the list.
In this article, I have decided to present you 3 such applications ready to offer you the TV alternative.
This application offers you exactly what I have said before. It is a simple program with no additional options, except the multiple skins option and the update module. I was very happy to see that an update option is available. Free TV Online has all the channels sorted by more criteria: By Genre, By Player type, By Country, By Language or By Station Type. This is very useful to help you in finding what you are looking for.
Because streams are played either by MediaPlayer (which comes with Windows) or by Real Player (which is not included with the operating system), the application will inform you, when you try to access a live stream, that you need to install a required player or codec.
Another useful characteristic of the application is that it lets you add streams to favorites. Selecting the videos to be sorted by Favorites you will have only the list with your preferred streams. Nice and comfortable. Enjoy watching!
JLC's Internet TV is a lightweight Internet TV application. It has a huge list of live TV stations sorted by country. Although in a beta phase, it is very stable and reliable. The favorites function eases the user's job to remember important stations and the update feature works fine. It found for me a total of 1224 stations. Enough isn't it?
Offering more than 1000 TV stations and appreciatively 1300 Radio Stations, along with a long list of webcams, Free Internet TV Player could be considered a champion at this level. The only inconvenient I found in this software is that the world "Free" is not totally covered. Watching or listening to those stations is actually free but the software application is trial. It can be used for 15 days. After that, you need to register for a one time fee of 29.95$. Well, we all know that good stuff has always a price.
