There is a company advertising a program which will allow one to receive thousands of TV programs directly on his PC.
Surely this is not possible?
What’s the SD on this?
I haven’t heard of this program.
However, TV tuner cards for your PC are common and inexpensive, and they come with the software you need to watch TV with it. I suspect the company you mention is just trying to get you to pay more for less.
This does remind me of an old Onion article:
“New $5000 multimedia PC downloads live TV programs, displays them on screen”
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with that.
Sure, why wouldn’t it be?
I’m goinf to get a tv card for one of my boxes soon
A quick look at a website that I won’t link to lists a few thousand television episodes available for download. So it is possible, it’s just less than legal. The program in question is probably some form of Bit Torrent or other P2P software.
Don’t know if this is it, but Sony has a hardware/software combo that lets you watch any video media you have at home (TV/DVD/Cable/satellite) on a pc wherever you have a network connection.
http://products.sel.sony.com/locationfreetv/flash.html
Certainly other companies are moving in the same direction…
EZ
I have seen the programs DWMarch is talking about, and they are essentially straight-up scams. Why would anyone pay a website to let them use a P2P app? Hell, if you’re gonna steal, don’t pay a website owner to help you!
I have also seen another kind of app. It’s basically just an 1) aggregator for all the TV stations in the world that stream their feeds online; and 2) a front-end for Windows Media Player\RealPlayer. In other words, these programs simply get a list of every news\TV website in the world that offers streaming feeds and make an “easy-to-use” program for finding content. They also work as a control that opens WMP\RP in the program’s “player window” (which, as I say, is just WMP or RP 'packaged" to look like their own program).
ReplayRadio basically does the same thing. After you install it, the program goes to the maker’s site and downloads the lastest scheduling information. You are then presented with an interface that lets you sort the results by country, genere, etc. It’s useful, but Replay Radio doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do youself with a web browser. (It does have the ability to record online audio programs and offers “TiVo style” scheduling options, so it’s not a complete waste.)
There’s nothing inherently illegal about this second kind of app, but they’re not so great for the consumer either, as you could just as easily go to the TV network’s website and stream it yourself. Why pay money for a nice front-end that will connect you to the BBC World Service when you can do exactly the same thing with IE or Firefox?
Oh, and I’ve noticed that the difference between the two apps (P2P vs. aggregators) is that the P2P apps relentlessly mention popular shows in their spam and websites (“WATCH ‘DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’ AND ‘LOST’ ON YOUR PC!!!”) while the aggregator apps go out of their way to avoid mentioning specific shows, presumably because not many people want to watch streaming feeds of local weather information from Lubbock, Texas or local-produced PBS “public interest” shows from Sebastian, Florida (which is what 99% of what aggregator apps offer).
This is not a tv tuner card.
The link to the program is
http://www.inklineglobal.com/adsales/affiliatesfuel/tvo_tvo.html
Kinda thought it must be along the lines MyNameIsEarl is talking about.
I have read in Wired of a company whose services come in handy when you want to get foreign TV. You get a subscription (including cable box, antenna, or whatever) for your desired programming in the country where it is offered. Then you hook the television/receiver up to the internet using this company’s products, and stream the resulting video and audio to your actual location. Dunno whether it also allows you to control the cable box remotely, but that would be cool.
A quick Google search shows that it’s an aggregator. It’s legal, but the page advertising it is beyond deceptive.
A good rule of thumb to note when buying products and services online is that if you can find more than one glaring typo or grammatical error in a single page on the site, run away. Run fast. This site has two such errors in the first three sentences and many more following them. They also claim over a million satisfied users, yet a Google search spits out only 564 hits for the name of the software, almost all of which are ads for the site or completely unrelated pages.
I thought it was interesting that twice they referred to “over 3000 channels and clips.” I’d be willing to bet that the “clips” vastly outnumber the “channels.”
I’ve noticed that the date the offer is guaranteed to is midnight, today (25th October). This seems like too much of a coincidence, so I’ve had a look at the source code. My Javascript is a bit rusty, but it looks like it is simply getting the date in the user’s time zone, and adding midnight at the end. In any case, if they intended an end date to the offer, then I see little reason for this level of scripting, rather than hardcoding the date,
I’m assuming some Javascript programmers would be able to confirm or deny this. Another way is simply for me to check this sometime tommorow.
Yes it’s definitely coded in: