TVU Player: TV for free
TVU Player is a free Windows app that lets you watch a variety of broadcast TV channels over the Internet. Unlike a number of web sites I've seen that promise free TV, TVU Player actually has some channels you might be interested in watching: ABC, Fox, CNN, Cartoon Network, ESPN. All told, about four dozen channels, including a number of foreign channels. It's live TV, meaning that you get exactly what you'd get if you turned on your TV right now, including the commercials. So where do the TV streams come from? The software doesn't say and the TVU web site doesn't give any clues, but this review at Web TV Hub suggests that there are people out there using TV capture cards to capture the video and then stream it to TVU, and then people who watch also rebroadcast it a la BitTorrent or Skype. (I can't resist pointing out that this is the exact idea I had about three years ago but didn't have the gumption to pull off myself.) The software isn't perfect, taking some time to buffer a channel before you can watch it and having not entirely reliable streams, but as a proof-of-concept or a last resort for people outside the U.S. to enjoy our *cough* glorious American TV offerings, it is pretty cool. Of course, there's no telling how legal TVU Player is, since it clearly operates without the consent of the TV networks it broadcasts, but does include those networks' advertisements. So, the usual caveats apply, but TVU Player is definitely worth checking out if you're a TV fan.
