NBC - Almost a Good Online TV Experience

I applaud NBC for providing a huge amount of TV content on the web for free (streaming at least). I'm pretty good about recording my shows, but this week my cable went out and therefore I missed a bunch of my favorites. In the past, I have watched episodes online at NBC.com without much trouble and was pleased with experience - high quality video resolution, low buffering times, clean flash player experience, light on commercial interruptions.

Where the flaws get exposed though is when you try to move that experience to your living room. I have a graveyard in my basement with headstones for a myriad of devices designed to move PC-bound content to your home theater (with the honor of my earliest/first such device being the "Audiotron" from Turtle Beach). I've now simplified my set up a bit by simply taking my MacBook down to the basement, plopping it down next to the TV and running a DVI-to-HDMI cable to my TV and mini-jack to RCA to my stereo. Decidedly low-tech but works great for this purpose.

So, back to my story.... I did this to watch a bunch of missed NBC shows this week. Easy enough.... click play, select "fullscreen" and then go sit on the couch. Now the problems... there was 1 pre-roll ad and 5 commercial breaks during the show. I don't fault them for that at all. The problem is that every time it hit a commercial it would kick out of full-screen mode back into normal size (oh yeah, and I had to stand there waiting for the 30 second pre-roll to end before I could select "fullscreen" to begin with). So, 5 times during the show I had to get up, walk across the room and reselect "fullscreen". NBC, if you are listening, please fix this - I can't imagine it's a hard problem to solve.

Problem #2... I was watching Friday Night Lights (apparently the target demo for that show is middle-aged women) and I got the *same* ad every single commercial break (Dove Body Wash). C'mon, I had just watched The Office and 30 Rock... is that all they could come up with to advertise to me?

TV online has come a *long* way... but still has a little bit further to go. I've signed up to get on the beta for Hulu, let's hope they can get us a bit closer.

Orb brings iTunes to Wii console

I've been a fan of Orb for a couple of years. Their remote access + transcoding/transrating engine has enabled me to stream music, tv and videos to my Smartphone while in my car, sitting in an airport, or just showing of to friends... "look I'm watching The Daily Show on my phone!". They also power the relatively new "Winamp Remote" feature of Winamp 5.3.

This relatively easy "hack" (if you can even call it that) now enable Wii owners to listen to their music over their stereo.

Orb brings iTunes to Wii console | Reg Hardware: "Demonstrating that you can do convergence on a budget, Orb claims that Nintendo Wii owners have downloaded 50,000 copies of its software that permits them to access their home music and photo collections on their games consoles."

Personally, I use a Media Center PC connected to a first generation "Media Center Extender" (from HP). I think I'm one of the few that actually own one of those things, but it gets the job done (with varying degrees of success - depending on whether I'm trying to stream audio or video over my 802.11g network). It's a nice step up from the Turtle Beach Audiotron that I used to use (or the 50 foot RCA cables connected to the mini-jack Y-adapter connected to my soundcard that I used before that). The question that I'm starting to ask myself, is what will I use next? Vista + Xbox360? AppleTV? Some other Set-Top Box? Not sure yet, but when I decide I will let you guys know...