Don’t Forget about your HDTV!
In my quest to remove the tether my cable company has on our family entertainment, I have been looking into ways of watching movies and television shows without having to pay a fortune to get it. There are lots of free places to watch shows, but it stinks having my HD TV sitting there dark most of the time. What A waste of a beautiful piece of equipment…an expensive thing just to stream Netflix to and play video games on.
Recently, several products have cropped up to help us reclaim our television sets, letting us turn them into giant HD monitors for our personal computers. Back in 2005, Microsoft released their Media Edition of Windows, but it was a flop due to bugs and low adoption. People just weren’t ready for it. With vista, and I assume Windows 7, the Media Edition (now called Windows Media Center) is bundled in the more powerful operating system, allowing us to push content from the computer to the television, without sacrificing quality, and without having a dumbed-down computer that does little more than store digital copies of our movies.
Taking a step back, even if you don’t have a PC to connect to your TV, you can stream content from many video, broadcast TV, and movie sites using a service like the one offered at MediaMall.com. All you need is a game console such as a Wii, Xbox 360, or a PlayStation 3 and a 1 time subscription to their product, PlayOn. Amazon Video on Demand, Revision 3, Hulu, CBS.com, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube, ESPN.com, and CNN.com are the first content providers you can access and watch using the system with your game console.
Now, back to your PC. In the last few days, a plug-in for your Windows Vista Media Center has been released to give you a fully-functional interface for the PlayOn service. It can be downloaded for free at http://myweb.cableone.net/eluttmann04/projects/vmcPlayIt/default.html.
If none of these things work for you because you miss watching live TV, you can always get an external TV Tuner device, or upgrade your computer to have the same functionality in your on-board video card. It even allows you to use your PC like you would a DVR or TiVo.
Oh! I can’t leave out Boxee (http://www.boxee.com). If you have a Mac or Linux computer connected to your TV, use Boxee to watch online content on your TV. It gives you a great interface to quickly switch between sites.
Written by Ben Hirsch
