Peter Griffin: Free streaming for news-hungry masses

As the internet becomes a more important channel for the media to reach its audience, the TV networks are increasingly putting their video feeds on the net to be freely streamed to web users.

If I miss the 6 o'clock news, I'll often watch the highlights at www.tv3.co.nz or www.tvnz.co.nz .

Cafenet.co.nz streams TV1 and TV2 from its website, and the feed is generally reliable and of reasonable quality.

Major international broadcasters like the BBC and CNN serve up news video clips on their websites every day. But what you generally don't get from them is a continuous video stream mirroring what goes out to millions of pay TV viewers. Why would they give away for free on the net what many people are paying a subscription to access?

I was surprised then to come across Chooseandwatch.com , which promises free access to the continuous video feeds of 150 channels, CNN, BBC, ABC, Eye Witness News and Al Jazeera included.

The website's menu gives the complete channel listings, which range from the aforementioned news services to the Sci-Fi channel, NASA TV, HBO movies and the stupefying E! channel.

Simply click on the channel, and after the usual buffering process, the video starts up in an embedded Windows Media Player. The content is up-to-date and continuous, but the streaming is stop-start when a thousand or more users are online. You really need broadband to get a decent feed.

It didn't help that the popular US tech community website Digg.com last week posted a link to Chooseandwatch.com, deluging the website with visitors. The site doesn't seem to have the capacity to handle large numbers of concurrent users, which really limits the value of the service. What it has allowed me to do is watch the occasional programme on channels I couldn't get, even if I was willing to pay

But Chooseandwatch.com is only one of these so-called video feed aggregators. They seem to operate by scouring the web for available video feeds and mirroring the stream on their own websites.

Streamick.com has a wide range of channels and a better user interface than Chooseandwatch.com, but it's plagued by the same stuttering service.

Another service called TVU Player involves you downloading a media viewer that gives you access to a couple of dozen channels.

The best results in terms of streaming quality came from www.freetube.co.nr . I was able to get through most of a news bulletin without the screen freezing in a pixelated mess.

Some of the websites operate along the lines of YouTube.com , letting you post video feeds. But surely they face the same sort of issues as YouTube when it comes to copyright infringement?

Chooseandwatch.com says the content streamed from its website is subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under Slovenian and foreign laws and international conventions.

Streamick addresses the question more directly: All this is perfectly legal. The TV channels wich [sic] can be found on the website are free video streaming available to anyone on the internet.

I doubt it's that straight-forward, but for now, if you're willing to put up with the degraded image quality, you can watch some of the biggest foreign TV channels for free on the internet.