iptv - wow! (review of the beta)

n25philly

I finally got a chance to check this out last night. For those who don't know what it is IPTV is free online TV available in beta in Media Center For Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. Here is a little review based on what I saw.



Interface - 9

I would say this is a mix of Tivo and on demand as everything is scrollable, and broken down by category. There is entertainment, sports, music, news, and movies. Evrything is big, well labeled, and has a picture that corresponds with the content. Everything scrolls horizontally and it's quite intuitive. It took a minute or so to find all the controls, but once I did everything works very naturally.



Commercials - 8

The reason IPTV is free is due to the fact that it's paid for with commercials. That can be a little scary because right away you think that there is going to be a commercial every five minutes. Fortunately not so. The it works, at least for now, is that there is one commercial after every program you watch. Not bad at all. At the moment they seem to be all Microsoft commericals so I hope you like X-Box360 commercials The only complaint I have here is that after the commercial it just goes into a random other program instead of going back to the menu



Content - 4

Obviously there is going to be limited content available this early on, but what is there there is pretty nice depending on your tastes. Here is a basic rundown based on category.



Entertainment - There are limited TV shows available, most of which I haven't heard of. If your one of the three people that liked Arrested Development you should be happy as the entire series run is available to watch. That is a good sign as it will be nice to get full seasons/series like that



Movies - Not too much to see here. It's all movie trailers at the moment. It can be cool if there is something you're thinking about seeing, but it would be a lot better with actual movies.



Sports - No actual sports, just sports shows. Not surprising since nothing in the service is shown live. With the quick look I took it seems like everything was from Fox Sports. You can go in and narrow it down by sport.



News - Didn't really look through much, but like most stuff here it looked like a lot of it came from Fox.



Music - Probably the coolest section at the moment, there are a bunch of live performances from all kinds of bands. Like the others the selection is limited, but there is pretty good variety. I spent most of my time with this watching Velvet Revolver Live in Washinton DC.



Performance/Quality - 10



OK, so how did all this run. F'n great, that's how. Video qulaity isn't quite up to HD standards, but what I say was standard TV quality at worst, and looked like it was actualy somewhere inbetween. It was certainly better than anything you typically see on the internet.



Performance is great. Not took long to load, and while I didn't time it, it seemed like less than a minute to me. There is absolutely no stops or stutter once something plays which is especially nice. The only time I ran into an issues was when I either minimized media center or switch from full screen to windowed there would be a little pause, but it would pick up right where it left off.



Bottom line - while the content isn't quite there to make you give up your regular TV service, it already makes a nice suppliment and could have a very bright future. I was highly impressed, and will be keeping an eye on it to see how it develops.