Television, despite its old age, has not only resisted time but has also developed more and more each year. I remember the times when in order to see an animated picture you either needed to look at TV or go to a movie. Nowadays everybody can become a TV star from home. With a web cam, a computer and a good Internet connection you can stream over Web images with you or whatever you want.

There is no longer a barrier that rises only to the lucky ones that make it to a TV station and some hot shot there discovers him/her. You can make your own shows directly from your own room. Well, if technology has advanced that much, then there is absolutely no problem in viewing your favorite TV shows live on the computer. That's right, there's nothing to it.

With the appropriate software you can do this the easy way, no more tuning and fine-tuning the image, you don't even need a TV card installed on your computer. And software is something the Internet will never cease to provide. The palette ranges from freeware that broadcast the TV station's shows using peer-to-peer technology and providing a myriad of useless stations nobody watches unless they are some freaks as there is nothing interesting, to commercial applications that provide select choices filtered by the user's wish.

OnlineTV is part of the latter category and its price is quite high, $39.95, but look at the full half of the glass: you no longer have to pay a monthly fee to watch the shows. Unfortunately the developer released the software for testing in demo version, which generally means that many (and usually most important) features are disabled. In this case you can only watch five channels imposed by the developer.

The interface is absolutely fine and seems to follow the established pattern for this kind of software. The channels are available in the left hand side of the application window while the larger part is for the video.

The five channels the developer unlocked for the demo version are the Baseball Channel, CNN, Museum TV, Music Plus TV and Police Channel. Besides the TV channels available in the list you can also listen to radio stations, but only after you get a license, as these are all restricted and a tester won't be able to evaluate them.

The most important section of the application is Options. As both TV and radio are streamlined from the Internet you can make performance settings for the best quality possible. The software can be set to automatically detect the connection speed or you can select it by yourself from a list. Also, for not having interruptions or watching the favorite show in frames, you can define the number of seconds of content to be buffered. Of course, this also depends on how stable is your Internet connection.

For DVD and video playback the choices include dropping frames so that video and audio streams are synchronized, video smoothing, display full screen controls and turning on the DirectX Video Acceleration for WMV streaming.

OnlineTV is rendering the video in Windows Media Player so plugins are supported for Video/Audio DSP, Renderer and other type of DSP.

The third tab in Options is designed for playing the digital media content streamed from the Internet (protocols for MMS URLs) and for multicast streams (for allowing the palyer to receive multicast streams) and configuring the proxy settings for HTTP and RTSP.

Despite the large number of channels put on display in the description of the software (over 3000 TV channels and radio stations from all around the world), the application's list is not as comprehensive as you may think.

For UK and USA I saw some cool channels worthy to watch (BBC, Sky News, CNN, C-SPAN 1-3, ESPN, FOX 8 Live, NBC, etc.) but there some major channels are totally missing (MTV, VH-1 are just two examples). The same is available for other countries that are populated with few channels and in most cases these are the least significant.


The Good

The application is very good looking and the channels available in the list are quite interesting. The quality of the image is very good.

The Bad

Despite the large number of channels announced in the description (over 3000, both TV and radio), there are some major lacks in the list. Smaller countries (Albania for instance) have very few TV channels (Romania did not even have the national television listed).

The Truth

The price is "spicy", the list of TV and radio channels is not great (some countries have absolutely no radio station listed) and every now and then the stream will disconnect.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: