Online Radio and TV

Over the years I’ve accumulated a couple small, black and white portable tvs. These are usually my “storm”/power outage tvs just because I can move them to a place where their antenna should pull in a good signal. They’re also my favorites for this because it’s easy to power them from batteries or a car lighter socket. I like options…. So, this is what I have first tested with a digital converter box. This article will talk about the box and it’s features.

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I just got a chance to play around with one of the new digital tv converter boxes and I wanted to give a series of articles on it so that you would have a clearer idea of where broadcast tv is going to be after this analog to digital conversion and what things will look like. First off, I wanted to give you a summary of our location, our previous over the air (OTA) reception of tv (analog) and give the background of why I’m interested in making sure we get digital reception. So, I live in Western North Carolina… Buncombe County to be precise in an area north of Asheville. Back before cable arrived….

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This is pretty nice, I visited Hulu.com the other day and found a nicely organized and presented site that has quite a number of tv shows and movies available for playing online. Most sites that claim to have online movies or videos for streaming have eclectic mixes of ancient items or amateur video, but this has “tvland”-sh selections up to even more recent shows. It looks as though they’re taking advantage of rss so if you want to know when they get a new Addams Family episode or a new Simpsons or Family Guy episode you can just subscribe to the feed.

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I’ve spent some time building some pages detailing where you can Listen to Radio Online, especially listening to Live Shortwave Radio Streams Online. At this point I’ve devoted most of my energy to the following pages: English Language Shortwave Radio Streams and Multi-Language Live Radio Streams Both have links to live shortwave streams. The multi-langauge streams typically have a mix of the major languages for the region, usually they include English as well though.

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Our atmosphere is a remarkable thing. Active solar cycles keep things juiced up well for good long distance radio propagation. Solar Cycles are cycles of sunspots, they are usually quite numerous, in fact the last solar cycle (23) was fairly active. Solar Cycle 24 is somewhat of a mystery at this point. There are two predictions… one that it will be a greater than average cycle and one that it will be lower than average (thanks… next you’ll tell me that tomorrow it will either rain or not.) I’m suspecting at this point that cycle 24 is going to be dramatically below normal in part due to the unusual start we’re seeing to the cycle. There have been many days without sunspots which is somewhat unusual in itself and the ones that have shown have been VERY shortlived and small disturbances.

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I have been distracted so much by hulu.com lately among other online video sites. It’s just fantastic that you can go back and catch up with some of your old favorite tv shows like this. I remember really enjoying The Pretender a few years back. It was on NBC and the premise was that this guy was taken as a child and raised by some shadowy group… the idea is he’s a genius and really can adapt and do most anything which was their interest in him, well then he escaped and was on the run from this “group”. The only problem I had is that I never seemed to be able to catch the sequence of shows, I’d catch one now and again, but miss out on the “big picture” story arc. But thanks to HULU.com….

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It’s been a busy week here and I’m forgoing the usual topical post that would appear here today in part because I wanted to highlight some of the pages I’ve added and worked on here in the last week. For starters I’ve got a main page called Watch TV Online on which I’ll be linking to and detailing the various ways we have of watching tv online. Mostly though, it will be separated into two categories Live TV Streams which are basically streaming live, not a 5 minute webcast, but an actual tv stream. Also, On Demand videos, movies and tv shows online Actually, I may be doing a seperate page for news on demand online. I’ve also added a page to Watch Live and on demand sports online. Where I’ve collected links regardless of language for various sports feeds from online. In addition to these…

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You may find this funny, but no I don’t have comcast (charter here), nor do I have a tv that’s capable of hdtv output (yes, go ahead call me a luddite…) But… I’m starting to wonder if it’s even that big a deal. In a short time the cable carriers may make hd look as bad as some of the worst online video streams. It appears that someone has become wise to comcasts increased compression on hdtv streams to try and get 3 streams in the bandwidth of one. It also looks as though the quality degradation is noticeable and would be enough for me to consider that IF I were paying for hd content and getting THAT, I’d want a refund/cancellation/etc.

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I’m a big North Carolina Fan - have been for almost as long as I can remember. So, I was of course pleased to see cbs doing full coverage of the entire list of tournament games online. My first hesitation though is that so many online outlets give a proprietary windows only access “install our activex plugin to view” kind of solution. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see no such requirement from CBS. So, on my linux laptop I’ve been watching the tournament (at times full screen.) Now, the viewer in the webpage doesn’t seem to allow for full screen (and the quality frankly isn’t quite good enough to sit CLOSE and watch full screen…), but… here’s the software I’m using.

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I was really excited to see that CBS at their CBSSports.com page is allowing anyone to stream the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament games for free. I remember last year there was the exclusive pass and you too could watch pixelated players shooting the ball. At the time I remember thinking that was something I couldn’t justify paying for. This year the drill was as follows: Anyone can access, but they only guaranteed good “reception” for those that had paid. I’ve enjoyed being able to pull up the games from the computer wherever I am in the house or out. (Even if it’s a game that they’re not following on our CBS affiliate.) That and a few other things got me to thinking about the state of online tv….

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