Latest Love <3 "Streaming Media"

Okay, so streaming media is certainly nothing new, at least not to me. In some ways I guess you could say it's an old love. Actually, I played around with the idea of an Old Love feature for this blog but it came about after I made the decision to keep things as they were. I guess Old Loves are something I'll save for version 2.0 of this little project. Anyway, even though streaming media is an old love, the variant I'm speaking of is a new one. I'm talking about streaming content provided directly from TV networks. Normally I would love to use this opportunity to trash big media and their ignorance of the Net and it's consumers, but this post is all about Love and that's all I'm gonna reserve it for. ;)

It's hard to tell what I heard about first... but I'm just gonna say it was the FOX deal. I was listening to an episode of The Dawn And Drew Show and heard Dawn extolling the wonders of the FOX On Demand flash player. She was in the same spot that I found myself in recently. She'd missed a few episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and navigated herself to the FOX site and caught up on the season right from the comfort of her browser, for free! I missed this past week's Hell's Kitchen and did the same. It was so easy. As easy as navigating to YouTube and watching a cat play the piano. I didn't have to subscribe to anything and the few commercial interruptions I encountered lasted no longer than 30 seconds as opposed to the four minutes or so I would've had to endure on network TV. It was beautiful.

Unlike FOX's site, I did have to subscribe to Hulu. The subscription process was no more cumbersome than any other subscription on the Net, it was pretty fast and simple. Initially, at least when I heard of Hulu, it was largely an NBC endeavor that resulted from a falling out with Apple and their iTunes Store contract. Now it appears there are several media giants' content you can stream. I even hear you can watch full-length feature films from the site, and like the rest of their content, for free! Pretty snazzy. But I've only taken a shot at streaming NBC's ER. I missed a few episodes this year and I used Hulu to catch up. It was a dream. So easy, so simple. In fact, I even forgot about this past Thursday's episode but didn't fret about it one bit since I knew Hulu would have my back. It's so great to have that safety net. In the past I would've had to torrent the show, and as much as I'm a proponent of torrenting I realize it's not without it's faults. There's always the worry about there not being a torrent out there at all, and if it is maybe the tracker site is down. Even still, if you're lucky enough to get your hands on the torrent you then have to worry about how healthy the seeding cloud is. Downloading your file could take minutes, hours or worse yet, days. It's so unpredictable, the entire process. The great thing about these streaming alternatives is having some degree of certainty.

Lastly there's South Park Studios, which obviously streams episodes of South Park... every episode of South Park! It's pretty awesome. Again, all streaming, all free and no subscriptions. The only down-side is an upload lag for new shows due to a contractual agreement with Comedy Central. :| But I suppose it's understandable. I've actually never used the site to the extent that I've used the others, because of that upload lag... but I hear it's great. I just like the idea that this option is out there, all of these options. It's quite spectacular when you think about it.

Okay, I suppose that's it for me. Appropriately enough I'm gonna jump onto Hulu and catch the lastest episode of ER. :P Now go my fellow gluttons, consume! ;)


DS333, *nom nom nom*.