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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 09-10/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
looking for an alternative to
TV reception via the three
classic methods of satel-
lite, cable or antenna, you’d
have to go the IPTV route.
WebTV is a practical and,
above all, mostly free way
to watch TV channels via
the Internet but there’s no
guarantee that the same
channel you were watching
today will be there tomor-
row, and if it is still there, its
quality is not guaranteed.
Another thing to watch out
for is that the channels in
some of the WebTV lists are
possibly being redistributed
illegally. In the course of our
testing we discovered one
WebTV list with dozens of
Russian-language TV chan-
nels - all being redistributed
over one server – that we
managed to localize to the
Ukraine. Included in the
list of channels, in addition
to Russian legal/public and
private broadcasters, were
other familiar channels such
as MTV. It’s fairly safe to
assume that these streams
were being redistributed
without the owner’s per-
mission. And sure enough,
when we tried to access the
server just before our dead-
line, it could no longer be
reached.
In the end though, it was
for us a lot of fun to dive
into the world of WebTV but
it still remains just an ex-
pansion of all the other re-
ception methods. We also
liked that the picture qual-
ity of the individual chan-
nels was on average quite
appealing and thanks to
the logical and easy use of
the Spark software, WebTV
is definitely interesting for
professionals and beginners
alike.
income that they would re-
ceive from their own web
site.
So, is WebTV an alterna-
tive to TV reception via sat-
ellite, cable or antenna? At
the end of a test report like
this, you’d undoubtedly be
asking yourself that very
question. Our simple an-
swer to that is ‘No’. If you’re
11. 3D channels are also
available via WebTV for free
12. Music channels of all
different styles are also
available
13. With X-Music, the name
says it all
determine that the picture
and audio quality of the indi-
vidual channels ranged from
very good to acceptable. To
play back SD content, your
Internet download connec-
tion should be at least 1.0
Mb/sec while for HD content
it should be at least 3.0 Mb/
sec.
The Spark software’s
WebTV
function
sup-
ports the Flash format and
MPEG4/H.264 in SD and HD.
Keep in mind though, that
you will need to know the
URL of the WebTV stream.
Content from the media
sites of TV channels or clips
from video platforms, even
when they happen to be in
Flash format, can only be
played back if you know the
exact address of the de-
sired stream. Unfortunately,
many providers go to great
lengths to hide these ad-
dresses from the end-users
mostly because they don’t
want to jeopardize any ad