There’s good news and bad news when it comes to watching streaming internet video. The good news is that there are now many new legal ways to watch video on your PC (think of web sites like Hulu, YouTube, and even NetFlix with it’s new streaming service). Those sites have an amazing amount of content available and more and more is getting added every day. Hulu lets you watch full episodes of hundreds of TV shows like “The Office” and “The Daily Show” as well as a growing catalog of movies with very few commercial interruptions. NetFlix allows their subscribers to stream over 10,000 movie and television selections (see my previous posts here and here). And YouTube lets you watch just about anything that isn’t copyrighted (and even some content which is).

The bad news with many of these services is that you’re still tethered to the computer. Hulu and YouTube are designed to be viewed from within a browser. NetFlix works the same way, although it does offer the Roku NetFlix Player which can be connected directly to your TV (read about that here).

I’ve talked about various ways to be able to watch that content on your television instead of on your PC but, outside of Roku’s NetFlix Player, most of those solutions get pretty complex. But now there’s a new piece of software out there which may finally allow you to easily watch that web content on your television. It’s from MediaMall Technologies and its name is PlayOn. Let’s take a look.

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When NetFlix first came out with their “Watch it Now” feature I thought that it was a big deal (you can read that post here). Here, finally, was a way to be able to watch a good chunk of the NetFlix catalog right there on your PC without having to wait for your DVDs to arrive in the mail. And, best of all, it was free for people who were already NetFlix members.

Unfortunately, in order to play those movies you had to use a special plugin for Internet Explorer, and that meant that you had to watch them on a computer. So, if you’re like me and you wanted to watch those movies on your TV, you had to be able to hook your PC (I used a laptop) up to your television. It worked, but it wasn’t exactly convenient.

Next came the vmcNetFlix add-in for Media Center (read my post on that here). This add-in allowed people who were running the Vista version of Windows Media Center to watch the NetFlix streaming videos inside of Media Center instead of through Internet Explorer. Even better, it allowed people who had Media Center Extenders (like an XBox 360) to stream that content to their TV without having to have a PC in the living room. That worked better, but it still required a PC (running Media Center) and a set-top box (the XBox 360 or other Media Center Extender).

But now there’s a way to watch NetFlix streaming videos without using a computer at all. It’s from Roku, and it’s called the NetFlix Player. Let’s check it out.

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In a previous article I talked about the "Watch it Now" feature available to NetFlix customers (you can find that post here).  That feature allows users to stream some of the massive NetFlix catalog over the internet so that they can watch the content on their PCs without having to wait for the DVD to arrive in their mailboxes. 

One of the main problems with using Watch it Now is that you are required to watch the video content using a special Internet Explorer plugin, and that means that you can only watch that content on a PC instead of on the TV in your living room.  The solution to that problem was to use PC or a laptop which was hooked up directly to your TV.  Now there’s a better solution, and its name is vmcNetFlix.

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In a previous post I’d talked about how to run MythTV, the very popular multimedia software, under Microsoft Windows (you can find that post here). The basic problem is that MythTV only runs under Linux — there’s no such thing as a port of that application to Windows. That previous post talks about [...]

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These days just about everything used in a home theater, from DVD players to video game consoles to amplifiers to the televisions themselves, is some type of computer. Because they are computers, many of these devices have capabilities far beyond their originally intended purpose. D-Link, for example, makes a line of DVD players [...]

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I’ve had a DVR (”digital video recorder”, such as TiVo) in my home theater for years. My DVR allows me to schedule TV recordings and watch them at a later time, freeing me from being a slave to the TV network broadcast schedules. In fact, I’ve become so accustomed to this way of watching television that I don’t even really know when the shows I watch are actually broadcast. When I sit down to watch my television shows I’m shown a list of recordings which my DVR has made for me and I choose a show to watch from that list.

Now what if I told you that there was a way to do that same thing with much of the video which you watch on the internet? There is, and its name is Miro. Let’s take a closer look.

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There have been a number of attempts to stream television shows and other types of video programming over the internet. All of these efforts have run into problems of one form or another - some technical, some legal, some monetary, and some a combination of all of the above. All of these attempts had one thing in common, however: they offered poor quality internet TV service containing little or no compelling programming.

The latest attempt to deliver quality TV over the internet is called Joost. It’s still in beta but it’s far enough along to demonstrate that its creators have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Joost may even offer a glimpse at the future of television. Let’s take a look at what Joost is and what makes it different.

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If you’re already a subscriber to Netflix, the DVD rental website, you also have access to a new feature they’re rolling out called “Watch it Now” which allows you to stream content from the Netflix site to your PC. And you can’t beat the price: free. Let’s take a look at what Watch it Now is, what it does, and how you can activate it on your account.

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