digital music/video
12/27/2005, 11:40am, EST
Tuesday, December 27th
Yahoo streams CBS sitcoms
Yahoo today announced that it is streaming two episodes from each of the CBS' comedies "Two and a half men" and "How I met your mother" for free via its website. Pushing the envelope for online video distribution, the move could help lure potential video-viewers to Yahoo rather than the iTunes Music Store. iTunes began offering video content to consumers for $2 per episode with the debut of Apple's fifth-generation video-capable iPod in October and has also been recently offering free videos to attract potential purchasers. In early November CBS revealed that it had been in talks with Apple to offer its content via iTunes after rival network ABC made several hit shows available through the online store.
Yahoo is offering the commercial-free episodes of "Two and a half men" entitled "We called it Mr. Pinky" and "Madame and her special friend" as well as "How I met your mother" episodes dubbed "The pineapple incident" and "The sweet taste of liberty" until Monday, January 2nd, according to the Associated Press.
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How about something that's not available anywhere else. Where's Supertrain?????
If I have my choice, I'd rather buy a program for $2 and watch it on my iPod wherever I want to.
Try watching a streamed program on an airplane :)
Please Note: Yahoo! Video is currently not compatible with Macintosh, Linux, or Unix systems.
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Personally, I don't see 2 temporary episodes, available only by net sustained stream over a protocol that is slower and not as clean as Quicktime presenting a great amount of competition to the infrastructure that iTunes has built.
Well first you'll need electricity, then a computer...this isn't yahoo's fault.
Thing is, they rushed it too bad it seems. Normally it should be "Not Available in Your Region" in plain HTML. That is the tradition.
Also they use either Macromedia Flash or Wmedia format for streaming, nowhere near Quicktime or Realvideo 10 quality.
I would be surprised if they have fullscreen option available.
If you have a Windows based PC out there, launch IE without signing in to Yahoo, having everything (QT, Real, Macromedia Flash) installed. Click a video story.
If it is Yahoo content, it will do "cool tricks" detecting your media player etc. After that, if you are lucky, you will have "settings" with windows media PRE SELECTED or, wmedia will start playing right away.
I am not anti MS or something but Wmedia... The format is awful, a joke if dropped to 100k levels. Servers are such a joke that BBC like monsters can't dare to try them even. Of course, one of reasons servers are a joke is: Unlike Real or Quicktime, you can't run Unix (OS X, Solaris, Linux) based monsters to serve streaming.