TVTonic, HomeChoice, and the future of TV over IP
We've seen the future that we want for TV. We've been playing lately with TVTonic, which is an on-demand IP television service that comes as a plug-in for Media Center PCs and that pulls content off of the Net and stores it on whatever spare space you have on your hard drive. It's free, but for right now it's better in concept than in practice and the content is limited to an ever refreshing assortment of Associated Press news clips, movie trailers, ancient cartoons, as well as an almost completely random selection of music videos (it's totally hit or miss, occasionally it'll surprise us with a New Order clip, but we're wondering if we're the only ones who can appreciate that Laibach video we caught this morning). What would make perfect sense is a service where you pay five bucks a month and get a customizable feed of music videos you'd actually want to watch. Not that any of the networks would even bother playing ball with them, but we could also easily be coaxed to pony up $15 or even $20 a month for HBO-On-Demand or Comedy-Central-On-Demand. We're not holding our breath for that or anything, but in Britain a lucky few are enjoying a service called HomeChoice that is sort of like this, and offers 80 channels of on-demand programming and pay movies.
