Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
TV Shows and Movies on the Internet Legally
Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on November 17, 2008
If you would like to learn how popular television programs and movies are increasingly provided as advertising-supported streams on the Internet, this video is for you. We demonstrate how to use three Websites (fancast.com, veoh.com, and tvguide.com) that index nearly all the legitimate TV shows and movies on the Net.
Gradually over this past year popular television programs and movies have been finding homes on the Internet at advertising-supported websites that permits viewers to watch them for free. Typically they are provided as streams, meaning that consumers generally have to watch them at their computers instead of their televisions – at least for now. Nonetheless, the amount of programming is getting to be abundant and may well have crossed a threshold whereby it will stimulate efforts to get Internet video to the television.
In this show we demonstrate three websites that aggregate indexes of nearly all of the television programs and movies that are legitimately hosted by, or downloadable from, authorized websites such as hulu.com and the iTunes Music store. The aggregators are (1) fancast.com, (2) veoh.com, and (3) TVguide.com.
TVGuide.com is the hardest of the three to use because the site is mostly a guide for conventional television. However, once you learn how to access the “Online Videos” tab, it’s less confusing. Even then one problem is that a fair percentage of the indexed shows require you to purchase them from iTunes.
It seems clear that the legitimate proliferation of conventional TV programs and movies on the Internet is a major development. For example, it is said that hulu.com is generating as much ad revenue as YouTube even though it only has a small fraction of the traffic as measured in number of items viewed.
The next step is to get Internet video to the television. To be fully successful, the methods used must accommodate both steams and downloads. It is likely that downloads will involve a fee (rental or purchase) whereas streams are more likely to be advertising-supported.
Length: This video interview is about 10 minutes long.
Categories: Podcast Video
Tags: digital-media, Fancast.com, Internet-video, Movies, Movies-on-Internet, television, Television-on-Internet, TV, veoh.com
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Hey Phil,
Happy holidays and ty for sharing, especially since the ipod now has a big screen adapter then you can have portable drive in movies when you are out and about on a date with your partner, wife, gf etc. I think you should demo this on the road and get out of your office/library and see if you think this would be a good niche for folks. Especially for those folks who have not yet purchased a new HDTV for the Feb 2009. If I lost you at hello, call me to discuss my bright idea!
Tim
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your shout out to Fancast. I’m probably biased, but I have to agree with you - we are the best!
Seriously, we are very proud of out library of absolutely free full-length TV shows (movies too) from all the major players, including all the big networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Viacom cable nets like Comedy Central, The WB, even pay channels like Showtime, Starz and HBO. We also have a great movie line-up. Your readers can check out the constantly growing library (currently over 5,000 hours of TV) at
http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
and movies at
http://www.fancast.com/movies
Cheers.
Jim (for Fancast)