The app itself is a small, stand-alone exe, about 1 MB in size, that runs with no registry or documents or folder traces. But I was leery of downloading the program because, A, it was an exe, and B, it was from a cheesy looking site with flash and Ads (though my Adblock hid them). I don't have any active anti-spyware or an anti-virus as those goes against my active policy of increasing performance (which, by the way, is always won by Windows and ends up in me having to reformat/reinstall) and a whole slew of incomaptiblity problems among anti-whatevers and other applications. Besides, they are superfluous once you pay attention to what gets into your machine. Nonetheless, I get my monthly fix of anti-virus online at trendmicro and an occasional anti-spyware fix from AD-Aware. But since it had been "peer reviewed" by a forumer (and by softpedia.com, as pointed out by the homepage), I went on and downloaded it. The link with the most google PR has the freeware version. There's also a one-time paid version of the program that offers radio channels and, conspicously, webcam feeds. But with 128kbps advertised speed and 110kbps actual speed, most of the interesting sounding channels looked like a powerpoint presentation with audio. Though the range of stations available was nonetheless staggering, I preferred to use my puny bandwidth to download downloadable videos than to let it get insulted by trying to stream videos.
Now, though not much can be said about the Indian broadband situation, the bandwidth has doubled to 256kbps for the same cost. There's even this "double bandwidth at night" scheme where I get 512 kbps (actual speed 416 kbps. Pathetic.) from 10:50 PM to 8:10 AM (untimely timings eh?). In this setting, a few days back I stumbled upon this tv.exe in my software backup partition (aptly named "Store" [66GB]. The other partitions are OS [15GB], Runnables [134GB], Media [80GB] and Linux[the rest]. Yeah, you don't care).
The list of channels is retrieved from the tvexe.com server everytime the program is started so that new channels are found and at the same time dead channels are pruned. The prog doesn't have the best UI ever and features a fixed size media player window. Though the you can list stations by country, language or theme, all that the app does though, is contact the tvexe.com and list the tv stations already available on the net. You can google for Internet broadcast TV or something similar and reach all the channels directly via a browser. Though it's a bit tedious at first to google-find the channels, if you bookmark the ones you want then subsequent access will be one-click access. You may even write your own program to either periodically google and parse out movie file links for you, or a more simpler program which maintains a manually entered list of channels and a embedded player. This will take out unscrutinized third party exes from your life.
Anyways, so far I've been able only to watch some of the channels and only at night when its 512kbps on th pipe. I haven't seen all the channels from around the countries yet, and I don't intend to. Almost 90% of them are religious propaganda bullshit. There are only a handfull of great learning channels and music video channels, almost no smut or soap channels AFAIK, and quite a few home shopping channels, news channels, traffic cam feeds, senatorial meeting videos, etc. And most of channels are from the US. The following english channels (from the US) are in my favourites playlist: NASA TV, Strawberry TV, Research Channel and UW TV (University of Washington TV). Here's a small review of my experience in these channels:
- In NASA TV, I got to see a never-before-seen (by me) footage of a launch and of the last moon-walk.There was also an in-depth program on auroras, which was as much interesting as it was useless to me.
- On Strawberry TV (I know), I had an arm-chair-travel to Natchitoches, Louisiana with a native tour-guide giving commentries on the various building and landmarks as we cruised the streets of the state. Another place was Natchez, Mississippi, though it wasn't as interesting as the Louisiana one. I've never quite gotten round to read who the so-called Confederates were all about, so it was nice when there was a short interview with American civil war researchers was on.
- On Research channel, I saw a meeting of podcast gurus talking about, well, podcasts. There was also a face-to-face with a wearable computer manufacturer (I believe). But most of the time there was only biology related talk.
- UWTV is my favourite so far. There were quite a few professional presentations on various tech topics. One was User Interface for the future Information Worker by a Microsoft research lady, and another was on Security framework in Applications (IIRC) by Microsoft's Cheif Security Strategist.
As you can see, I was excited with what I saw on the channels. It was a welcome change considering I had stopped watching TV since the stupid cable situation started and I lost all the quality channels. Sure I watch the TV programs I miss, movies and other videos via BT, but that's another story :)
If my rants have lured you into downloading the exe, I would recommend you search for other programs. I found one other program that was waay better than tv.exe. It's called Online TV Player and it's supposed to have 850+ channels and 1000+ radio channels by default, although I suspect they count the high and low bandwidth stream of the same channel as two channels. Well atleast this program HAS the high and low bandwidth options of the same channel unlike the tv.exe thing, so I guess it works out OK. And, BTW, if you are wondering about the title, Boob Tube = Goggle Box = TV ;)
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