Tim Tebow, Steve Carell, Justin.TV, and the Future of Television

Last night was a bit of an eye-opener for me in terms of mixing passive entertainment with a more active online crowd. I wanted to watch the second half of the college football BCS Championship game between Florida and Oklahoma.

I don’t have cable or an antenna or anything, so my best bet was FoxSports and their "second screen" online broadcasts.  These were meant to be viewed as complementary footage alongside a real TV playing Fox, and that got old pretty fast.  The best view I could find was the "cable cam" which was a single-camera broadcast with no graphics or announcers.  I took my grievances to an unrelated chat room and someone recommended I try Justin.tv.  Imagine my surprise to find a live stream of the Fox broadcast that beat YouTube quality. On top of that, there was a chat room full of fellow football fans cheering and jeering.

My Justin.TV experience

Between the channel I watched and a few other J.TV channels carrying the game, there were over 10,000 people tuned in to the same live program last night.  Was it legal?  I’m not sure. I have a feeling any ads run alongside this would particularly bother Fox.

Want to try your own live stream?  I imagine this sort of thing could be fun for someone who wants to reenact Christian Slater’s Jeep-powered pirate broadcasts from Pump Up the Volume, so here’s a writeup describing the basic home rebroadcasting setup.  Again, I’m guessing that rebroadcasting something a football game will put you at risk, but this could obviously be used to hold live viewings of any sort of video you might have put together.

Other magical mystical TV moments from last night

- Watched House on Hulu in wide-screen hi-def with CLOSED CAPTIONS on.  This is huge to me – I’m hearing impaired and Hulu is the first and only place I’ve seen reliable closed captions available alongside streaming video.  Note: This only ever shows up on House, not on Heroes (which my wife and I watch via Netflix "Watch Instantly") or on The Office (which we watched via Hulu).  I should check out some other Fox shows on Hulu to find out whether or not they’ve got captions available.

- Watched a DVD of Deadwood that came in the mail via Netflix weeks ago.  Again, I was able to watch this one on my new laptop’s widescreen.  Closed captions worked well enough and there wasn’t really any stuttering to be seen.

Wait, how is this sharing again?

This post is admittedly far from the usual fare here on Sharing at Work but I thought it was worth sharing all the same.  Here’s the rundown:

1. Unauthorized users have replaced Fox’s unsatisfying web broadcast by "sharing" a middling quality live stream.  Tens of thousands of viewers joined in and watched and chatted together.
2. Hulu’s RSS feeds tell me exactly when the newest episodes of House and The Office make their way online.  I have a habit of emailing those notices from Google Reader to my wife to let her know that I’d like to catch up some time soon.

We don’t even use our DVR anymore, just Netflix and our various web TV options.  I didn’t feel too bad picking up that ad-heavy Fox broadcast last night, but I’m sure the same thing can and will be done on less obviously free broadcasts such as PPV sports specials or premium channels.  We’ll see how I feel about those when the time comes.  Right now, I’m stoked about the arrival of Boxee on Windows.  I can’t wait to get a unified interface for consuming all of the free and paid video streams (i.e. Netflix) we have access to.

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