brian's blog

So AOL launched their In2TV service last week, allowing episodes of 30 classic TV series to be streamed or downloaded for free. I spent some time playing around with it. Overall, it's pretty slick, particularly the Hi-Q episode downloads.

Pros:

• 700kbps streaming rate
• Full-screened looks fantastic at 700kbps
• Huge nostalgic factor; there are some great shows and episodes (Perfect Strangers! Pinky and the Brain!)
• Message boards (with personalized avatars / profiles) to build community around shows
• There’s a “Hi-Q” video player that, once installed, allows you to download episodes for high quality playback (This is, I think, the biggest value – I downloaded a full episode (270 MB) which ultimately gives me an experience that exceeds the BitTorrent world – a) easy to find, b) very high quality, c) downloadable, and d) ad-free. Only downside is that the content expires in a few months.

Cons:

• Somewhat buggy; some videos took a few tries to play (and a few errored out)
• When streaming, commercials are poorly inserted into the episode. With Perfect Strangers, there was first an ad before the show started, then the show opening sequence, then another ad, then the episode. Every time an ad was inserted, the playback stopped and nothing was shown to indicate what was happening. It seemed broken. 5 seconds later, the ad would start. And in full screen mode, whenever the player jumped between ads and the show, the screen would jump back to the smaller player until the next clip started 5 seconds later – a very poor experience.
• Brightness / contrast is much lower than it should be on some shows
• There are many series, but only 10 episodes per series
• The interface is too busy / hard to navigate
• Some episodes are mislabeled – the episode in the picture above had nothing to do with the description

Other:

• The streams seems to be DRMed, which would be the first time I've seen streamed content DRM'ed (I saw an error message about “license acquisition failed” at one point)