I'd love to be able to trust computers for watching TV online, but they're still fairly undependable for that for me. And as for the "future of television," watching videos on computers still seems about as haphazard as it was 20 year ago. It still involves skips, jumps, slow downloads, focus issues, computer lock... Added now are slews of pop-up boxes and half-screen sliding windows, connection and buffering problems, and delays that take the control of my TV watching and put it at the finicky moods of the computer.
I'd love to watch movies and TV shows on these sites [on my home computer, of course], but at work had the following difficulties:
Hulu - the index of programs looks very interesting to me, but my computer can't play anything on this site, so I couldn't try this part of the iHCPL exercise.[Adobe Flash Player says I must get version #10 before I can watch anything here, but I'm not authorized to download anything to my computer myself].
Cast TV - the video clips seemed fuzzy and halting, like stop-motion animation. I started various clips to see if they were worth watching, and when I switched them to Full Screen they wouldn't expand, they'd just start over at the beginning with the commercials. Not worth watching.
TV.com was great! The CBS shows there were clear and quick.
ABC.com turned out pretty good, but I had trouble scrolling around to see everything off screen.
"Joost" had "squat," but I liked UStream since it had video game footage.
The Internet Movie Database: also demanded Flash Player 10 and wouldn't play anything for me.
So some sites were great, others were promising, disappointing and troublesome. But I don't plan on spending a lot of time trying to find the ones that are dependable.
Watching TV on my Cell Phone: not much interest in doing this currently. My phone screen is too small to enjoy, the sound's not good enough, and it's not a feature I want to pay for or use battery power to watch.
And the amount of free time per day that I allot for TV viewing is spent watching at home, and not "on the go." I can see how this might be an option I'd want to keep in mind for "emergencies" though. But I have a great many other options for TV and movie watching already.
Streaming Programs and Posted Videos: I haven't gone looking for streaming programs, but I can think of some types I might be interested in; tropical beaches, or DisneyWorld... hard to say. For me this is the equivalent of staring out the window, and I have so many other things I'd rather be doing.
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