Introduction
The Broadband revolution continues apace. New and existing media companies are setting themselves up on the Internet. The pot of gold is obvious; the Internet is a cheap distribution medium. The challenge is to build a brand which the general population are aware of. Presently, media companies are reasonably bound to geographic locations.
This makes sense because one can target certain types of advertisers, however with the Google Adsense revolution and the evolution of more targeted and behavioral based techniques, TV can make a profitable move to the Internet. Internet, TV is not as profitable - currently - but its changing.
You can download the BBC iPlayer if you live in the UK but it doesn't work if you don't which means it has limited
appeal It also uses Windows DRM protection for its content which is a bone of contention in the industry.
YouTube has shown how successful video on demand can be and it's all to play for as it now is going with an ad-supported model sponsored by Google.
Also, Divx now has its own built in Stage6. Other competitors for Joost are
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Zattoo - Live programming, including sports, chat, news, and sitcoms.
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Vuze - Focus on hi-def. Not everything is available everywhere. PC-only. No Mac.
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Jalipo - Not P2P but streaming. Pay-as-you-go. Live content, including BBC World.
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Ziddio – shoot, share and get on TV.
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Veoh - a site backed by media mogul Eisner, hopes to blend YouTube user-generated video with episodes streamed by major TV networks like ABC and Fox, organizing them in channels and saving videos from sites that allow downloading.
My impression of Joost is that it's
nice but the content is very old and not something that's a 'must
watch'. 
There's tons of user generated
content out there.
So how can you get it onto your TV?
If you've an XBox360, you'll be connected to a TV more than likely.
XBox and TVersity
One solution is to put TVersity on
your PC and hook it up to your PC. Recently,
I setup TVersity to stream divx to my xbox 360. In order to do this, I
had to disable media sharing on my Windows Media Player 11. Also, I had
to restart my machine after my install. After that I setup my shared
folder and enabled the media sharing application. My Xbox 360 is
connected to my HDD TV which looks great with Gears of War. TVersity is
a pretty nice application. It offers a nice Web console which you can
run on your browser and you specify your local machine with a port
number specified in the help pages. The only fly in the ointment for me
is that I had to install new new codecs which covered my needs.
TVerstiy streams wmv. It isn't
picture perfect and there is a certain
amount of blocking that goes on. However, it's better than playing the
divx on my PC whose screen times out after 10 mins and the sound is no
longer synched with the video. The application is free and there is a
good support section for newbies like me. You can get it Tversity
For a while I found that certain shows were causing the MediaServer to crash complaining about the divxdec core. The solution for me was to install the codes that are hosted on sourceforce called ffdshow. You can get them here. Hope this helps! There's also a 4CC utility where you can specify the encoding type but try ffdshow first.
