Free Movies, Videos & TV

We all are familiar with the situation where you are just thrilled to watch your favorite show and another member of the family has claimed the remote control or the television broke down or the cable connection has vanished. In these times of technological benefits there is no harm done, as long as there is a computer around with a strong internet connection.

Today’s technology is providing us with the possibility to make the connection to the world wide web and to get your hands on any information you might require and that includes television channels. There are different ways for you to be able to watch TV on your computer, but basically they have one thing in common and that is that a fast high speed internet connection is necessary.

You can watch TV on your computer by adding some hardware to your computer which provides you with the possibility to convert your PC into a television and a hard disk recorder at the same time. The first way to make this happen is to use a TV tuner card. These cards have to be installed right into an empty PCI slot of a desktop computer. The card has an analog-to-digital converter built into it, which gives you the possibility of recording TV programs straight to the hard drive of your computer. There are a variety of TV tuner cards on the market, so make sure you do the research before you make any decisions on the final purchase.

If you don’t have a desktop computer or you simply don’t want to use a tuner card, the second option you have is to purchase a USB TV tuner. USB TV tuners can be used in laptop computers as well. They are easier to install and use in comparison to TV tuner cards. When you are researching these USB TV tuners, you might want to check if you can get your hands on one that captures on-air channels next to cable input.

The last suggestion has nothing to do with adding hardware to your computer but consists of software only. There are a lot of opportunities on the world wide web to get some software in order to be able to watch TV on your computer. You have to be careful though, because you don’t want to download programs that are so heavyweighted that they will shut down half your system every time you use the service. The best thing is to search for websites that provide an online service without anything being downloaded to your computer. Make sure you have a good protection program on your computer and if you have a strong internet connection, the sky is the limit.

The satellite company DirecTV has added a new service to their usual satellite television service which is DirecTV Internet. This services provides you with an internet connection using the satellite instead of the regular internet. There are two ways in which DirecTV is mostly offered. It can be made available to you through the use of the satellite dish or it can be available to you through another company with whom DirecTV has a partnership.

The offering of DirecTV Internet is a reaction from the company to the large amount of package deals that are being offered by companies of cable television. In the early years of digital television and mobile networks, it was common that a company had its own specialty and they simply stuck with it. Nowadays it is reality that these companies have managed to either build their own diverse operations or they have gone into partnerships with companies that have a different specialty. By joining foces, they can offer a diversity of services.

DirecTV has been active in the internet business for some time now, but they were always rather expensive. Now they have partnered up with local phone companies and are able to make better offers. The company offers satellite internet along with the normal satellite services for a reduced price.

There are some locations where the DirecTV Internet service is not yet available. This is due to the fact that DirecTV Internet has not been able to make partners with a local company in order to offer the service. For the people who find themselves in this situation DirecTV offers another solution. Just contact them and find out what your area situation is like, and what they can offer.

As DirecTV Internet is not depending on cable networks the problems of transmission are negligible, but the satellite connection is very sensitive to influences of the weather. Rain, storms, snow, fog and ice are influences that have a negative effect on the transmission speed and the connection in general.

The benefits from using DirecTV Internet is that it is very easy to install on your own, it is very easy to make it portable and you have a connection which is active around the clock. Also you will have access to the most wide range of channels. The company has an excellent customer service that can assist you if there are any questions or complaints.

The downside of DirecTV Internet is that the connection is in need of permanent mounting in order to stay stable. Also the disc needs to be cleaned very frequently and as mentioned before is very sensitive to outside influences. The price may also have you take a step back and rethink, because in comparison to cable, it is rather expensive. But just like any other service, you have to know what you want in order to determine if this service is the right one for you.

Multimedia which is continually received by a general public and which a streaming provider is delivering is called streaming media. The term comes from the way the media is being supplied. There is a difference between media which is being distributed via a telecommunications network and media which is being supplied by inherently streaming like television or radio and there can be inherently non-streaming like video cassettes, books and audio CDs.

Live streaming simply means that you have a type of media and you have it broadcast live on the internet. What you need to make this happen is a camera to capture the media, an encoder to take care of digitising the content, a publisher of media who makes the streams available and the final touch is the network which has the responsibility to distribute and deliver the content to the public.

This new method of distributing media has created new challenges surrounding security. A lot of effort is being put in to make sure that the media stays secure, because there is a lot of money involved in providing and distributing media. The systems of Digital Rights Management (DRM) are a good example of securing media.

For the last ten years, there have been big changes in the use of the internet. There have been developments in increasing the bandwidth, an increase in network access, making of standard formats and protocols became more popular and the internet has become very commercial. These improvements in the digital world in combination with modern systems and stronger home computers, which are very powerful, have made the streaming of media to be affordable and practical for common end users.

Because of the fact that multimedia has a large volume, it is still very important to have enough transmission speed and media storage, which brings along some costs. In order to cut these costs in general, the media are compressed for storage as well as for streaming.

There are two different ways to stream media. The streaming can occur to your computer live and in real time or you can stream it on-demand. When you use live or true streaming it provides the service of directly sending the media to the device or computer without the file being saved on a hard drive. Streaming on demand is provided by progressive download or progressive streaming. When you are using progressive streaming, it means that the file is being saved to a hard drive and is then played from the location of the hard drive. Streaming on demand is often available for a long period of time as oppose to live streams which is only available in real time.

While the cable companies and digital TV providers keep on their toes in order to keep up with the technologies, they will lose to the capability of the world wide web every time. Not only do these companies have huge overhead expenses, they need to make very large investments in order to keep up to date giving audiences what they want. In modern society that is not very easy, because the interest of people goes beyond national TV and with more and more people working flexible hours, tuning in right on time for your favorite show sometimes just isn’t possible.

On your computer however, you can tap into the world wide web and have no boundaries on your media-consuming behavior, because there are a variety of options and choices. You can choose to tune in on time for your favorite show to watch it live or you can choose to watch it on the weekend when you really have the time to enjoy it. How can you make these resources available for yourself? Well, just log on to the web and start to explore.

Especially for computers running on Windows, there is a huge variety of choices. The process begins by asking yourself if you are willing to pay for the services provided. If the answer is yes, you can research your possibilities in TV tuner cards or USB tuner cards. They basically both work the same but the difference is that a TV tuner card can only be used on a desktop computer and the USB tuner cards can also be used on a laptop computer.

If the answer to the “willing to pay” question is a big fat no, there still are a lot of possibilities to watch TV on your Windows computer for free. One of the options is to simply visit the websites of major TV channels like NBC or ABC and browse your way through the programs that are available. It really is not much different from viewing on your television. (Although they may archive some recent shows which you may have missed, we are discussing Live TV here). Of course, this can come in very handy if your television is broken and you need to see what's being broadcast right now!

The real difference is with software programs or website services which provide you with the possibility to watch TV live from over 3500 TV channels from all over the world. From China to Africa and from Russia to Australia, there is not a country missing. You can either choose to download a software program which allows you to navigate from your own computer or you can choose to use a website service where you can make your choices on the website.

Keep in mind to always do some research on the services you are planning to use, so you can be sure that you are making the right choice. There are many review sites and forums on these, so Google it and get on with it!

Since iPlayer is a service provided by the BBC for UK residents who have paid television license fees, it has a restriction for people who don’t live in the United Kingdom. If you try to log onto the service outside the UK, you will get the announcement that you are not allowed to watch iPlayer. This is not a very hard problem to resolve, it is just a matter of deceiving the service. You have to let the service think that you currently are present in the United Kingdom and therefore have every right to use the services of iPlayer. First you must ask yourself the question – do I think I have the right to do this? If not, close this page. But if so, then the question arises how do you deceive the service? There are different ways to achieve this.

There is a software program available which is known as Identity Cloaker and this piece of software can be used for watching iPlayer live as well as for downloading the TV programs to watch later on. The software gives you the opportunity to make use of a UK VPN and UK proxy server. This way you can surf your way through a secured proxy tunnel and connect to the service of iPlayer. Because you enter the service through a secured tunnel, the security of iPlayer is not able to detect the fact that you are not physically within the boundaries of the United Kingdom.

There are also TV proxy servers available that allow people who live abroad to have access to the services of iPlayer. The only condition is that you have to be in possession of a BBC TV license, otherwise you can’t use the service. There are also some server companies who offer you the use of proxy servers especially for users who are based outside of the United Kingdom. However these services charge you for their services. The fees that are being asked for a one year service are somewhere in between 120 and 180 pounds. If you are in possession of a Mac computer, the answer for you would be to use Slingbox.

The last option you have when you would like to watch your favorite UK TV shows is to stay in touch with your friends and family in the UK. You need a computer which is present within the United Kingdom so you can create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnel. This way you can access the service of iPlayer through the computer based in the UK. Downside for this method is that the download speed is negatively influenced.

There still are some other free proxy servers available, but the problem of a slow speed connection also applies to these services and next to that, to set up proxy services when you don’t know what you’re doing is rather difficult to do.

When you have been looking around on the internet exploring your options on how you can watch your favorite TV shows on your computer, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed. All the services, software and hardware out there, may make you feel like you have to be a real computer freak to sort all this information out and make it actually happen. So here is some information on how you can make the right choice for yourself.

The first thing you need to do, just like with any other decision, is to decide for yourself what you want. Do you want to watch TV on your computer live in real time or do you just want to keep up with your favorite programs on the weekends or any other day which best fits your schedule and not the schedule of the TV guide. Also you need to ask yourself if you are willing to pay for the service. People may think that a paid service always tops a free service in quality, but with internet TV that is not the case. Once you have figured out what you want you can start targeted searching, opting out everything that doesn’t meet your wishes.

If you really want to watch live TV in real time, you have to search for software programs that provide that service. These programs need to be downloaded to your computer and when you use them, they will connect to the server and stream the information to your computer often using Windows Media Player. These programs provide TV channels from all over the world, up to 78 countries and a total of over 3500 TV channels. There is no lack of choice here. Some of these services come with a low cost fee and some will be free. The challenge is to search the internet on reviews to see if there is any difference in quality between the paid and free software. Maybe you don’t mind if you don’t have HD quality if the service is free or this feature might be very important to you. In any case, that is up to you to decide.

As well as streaming live TV to your computer, there are very many websites which provide a service of watching TV shows after they have aired and you can watch them on demand in your own time when it suits you best. These services often have a directory of every show you can think of, both current and past TV shows. It can be quite fun, and often funny, to take another look at a TV show you use to watch when you were a teenager. Also these services often provide the possibility to track certain current shows and you will get an email notification as soon as the next episode is available for you to watch. This way you will never miss an episode again.

Now you know what to do in order to watch TV on your computer. It is not hard at all. You just have to know what you want and perform targeted research. This way you make sure you get what you want for the price you want.

Streaming internet TV is the most up-to-date way to be able to watch TV on your PC. By downloading certain software or choosing a streaming service online, it is suddenly possible to watch TV on your PC worldwide. Now you can have access to all these TV channels with countless categories for you take your pick from. The way the news and entertainment reaches us has changed a lot over the last couple of years, all due to developments in new technologies. There are a lot of newsfeeds present on the internet and newspapers tend to go digital rather than pressed on expensive papers.

When we keep it simple, streaming internet is the way that video and audio is being delivered making use of an internet connection. In previous times, this way to deliver media to the computer was called Internet Protocol Television or IPTV. With this type of delivery, it suddenly becomes an option to watch TV on a mobile device or a computer.

Whilst it sounds very modern, the way the information is delivered is rather similar to how your television gets the information. Where the television uses a network of cables or an antenna the computer receives the information over the internet where the information is being transmitted as data. Even though the way of transporting is not very different, the possibilities are very different. Through streaming you have access to over 3500 tv channels from all over the world.

Since the streaming of internet TV is a very new way to watch programs, it is also very hot and just as any other hot new thing this comes with a lot of potential providers. There are a lot of services available on the internet who can make it possible for you to stream TV shows to your PC. Next to the official websites of the big television network companies, there are many websites who offer either live streaming services or on-demand services. These are very friendly and easy to use websites where you can find a lot of TV shows ready to watch when you feel like it. You can also download one of the many software programs that are available in order to be able to stream directly to your PC.

Whatever service you will end up choosing, there is always some research necessary. Everybody has different priorities or wishes and therefore choosing a service for streaming TV to your PC is a very personal choice. Luckily there is a lot of reviewing information available online which is worth taking a look at before deciding on any service.

Do you find yourself being curious about what is going on in different parts of your country or maybe different parts of the world? Maybe you want to know more than just the stuff you see on the eight o'clock news. Maybe you are interested in somewhere specific and want news that doesn’t make it to the world press, but still is very current for the locals. Streaming TV to your PC is a great way to stay up to date with events all over the world or maybe of events in your hometown while you are away.

Or maybe there is just an evening in your TV schedule that has absolutely nothing to offer on your regular channels.

WWITV is a streaming website which provides live TV footage from all over the world on all kinds of topics like business, news, weather, sports, government issues and so on. Next to these services, they have a very easy-to-use navigating system to find the programs you are interested in watching. The best way to enjoy these services is if you have a broadband connection.

To get started, you have to click on the country you are interested in and follow the scroll-down menu. Then the local news channels will display their web streams. It may occur that there is no live stream at that particular time, but when you click on the link, you will end up at the website of the channel where you can select videos made of the stories that are current. If you choose to click on a link for a live stream, the live stream will be brought up using Window Media Player and bring the website into your internet browser by default.

Live stream and current news or weather reports are just a part of a service which next to the mentioned categories also contains programs in the line of classic movies, comedy, adventure, drama series, sci-fi, adventure and so on. Of course the series and the movies etc. are not available on demand. There are other ways to do that. When watching live stream TV, you have to watch whatever is on currently, just like you are watching regular TV, only the options are extended to worldwide.

Not only is this a great way to watch TV and follow the local news while you are away on a business trip or a well-deserved vacation, it also takes care of the remote control problem at home. We all know the arguments that can come up when different members of the family wish to watch different shows on the television. That is history, because you can still watch your favorite programs on your computer while the rest of the family carries on about the remote control.

For all the people out there who are looking for a way to watch TV on your PC for free, there is a very good way to do just that. There are a lot of free services where you can watch TV through your computer, but a lot of the time, their servers get overloaded because there are so many of you trying to relax by watching your favorite show. Because the services are free, they don’t carry enough power to provide for all of the members at once. Joost is not one of them.

Joost is a streaming video site where it is possible to watch TV on your computer for free without having technical difficulties with speed. They have a database which contains over 15,000 shows and more and more shows are added on a daily basis. The shows in their database are the top shows like David Letterman, Hogan Knows Best, Larry King Live etc. You are able to make your choice from over 250 different channels which include the very popular channels of Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, National Geographic and so on.

So what does Joost have that other streaming sites do not? First of all, there is the huge amount of programs and channels from which you can make your choice and also it is nice to have one central streaming site where you have all your programs together and you don’t have to switch sites every time you want to watch a different channel. The quality of the videos is close to excellent and the amount of time it takes to load a video is very fast. There will be no freezing or slowing down while you are watching. All you have to do to get started is to download the Joost media player which works on Windows as well as on Mac.

Other advantages of Joost are that you are able to skip parts in the show you are watching without delaying the connection or you can skip from one show to another very quickly and very easy. There also is the possibility of playing it in full screen or having it run in windows mode while taking care of some other tasks on your computer and still the connection stays stable. Navigating is very easy because there are different options. You can search by genre or just perform a search on keywords.

The movies you will be able to find on Joost are not the most recent releases. However, they have a database of movies that will bring back a lot of memories. And be honest, taking a trip down memory lane when you watch an old classic movie can be very enlightening.

Next to all of the possibilities of free streaming services, paid streaming services and programs to watch TV on your PC, the next obvious step is to watch digital TV on your PC. Even though it is available, it still is in baby shoes and needs to be researched before making any decisions, otherwise you might end up being disappointed because the service doesn’t provide within your expectations.

Digital TV for your computer is available online and can be purchased for the amount of approximately $40. When you decide to make the purchase and download it, you have to make sure that the site is to be trusted or you may end up contaminating your computer with all sorts of spyware. Once you have found a trusted site and have downloaded the software, follow the instructions and reboot your computer. When your computer is running again, you have to open the digital TV for PC interface. Once that is open you can make your choices and watch whatever you want. Since digital TV for PC contains over 5000 TV channels to watch and over 2000 radio channels to listen to, you don’t have to be bored any time soon. Sounds too good to be true? Well, maybe it is or maybe it isn’t, depends on what you are expecting. Keep on reading and make your own decision.

Back in the day, everybody had an antenna and was able to receive all free channels to watch. Then along came the cable companies. Suddenly we could experience drastically improved quality of audio, video and of course content, as they provided access to a much wider range of channels. In order to make such improvements, these companies have to charge for their services. Seems fair?

Going back to digital TV on your PC, this is a service which provides you the possibility to watch heaps of channels, as mentioned above. A lot of channels to choose from, the only thing is, these are the free channels. If you are under the impression that you will be able to watch big time channels like MTV digital on your computer, then you are going to be disappointed, because that’s not the case.

“Too good to be true or not” all depends on what your expectations are when going in. If you expect to watch high profile channels then it is too good to be true. If however you expect to watch older programs and a lot of news channels, then you will be happy because your expectations are being met. Since all these types of services keep developing and evolving, there may come a time where it is possible to watch all the new and hot TV shows digitally on your computer, but just not yet.