Opinion: Five reasons to ditch your cable box or satellite

June 23, 2008 (PC World) Lost lost me a long time ago. I'm sick to death of all doctor shows (but especially Grey's Anatomy). And if I see one more CSI or Law & Order spin-off, I may turn homicidal myself.

I figure millions of other sofa surfers feel the same way I do. Fortunately, we now have a wealth of online alternatives to the same old, same old. Webcasters such as Joost and Veoh have emerged to compete head-to-head with cable, satellite, and broadcast TV -- and new services seem to pop up every week.

Unlike video portals like Hulu.com or YouTube, these Webcasters offer stand-alone viewers and cable-like channel lineups, as well as new ways to interact with what you're watching and who else might be watching with you.

Admittedly, some services are more ready for prime time than others. But all offer smart alternatives to the idiot box, for a lot less than $50 to $100 a month. Here are five good reasons to kick the cable/satellite habit.

1. Joost

From Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis -- the brainy Finns who brought you Kazaa and Skype -- comes the much-hyped Joost, which is less like a new form of TV than the old one juiced up with such Webbish features as chat and blogging.

Once you launch Joost's stand-alone player, it acts like a TV set that you've switched on, automatically streaming whatever channel you were watching when you last turned it off. Joost's programming is a mix of older mainstream program s-- original Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes, Snoop Dogg and REM music videos, Ren and Stimpy cartoons -- plus selections from sources like The Kung Fu Film Channel and College Humor TV. Some are preceded by 10- to 30-second spots for Clorox, Cadillac, Excedrin and other products, but otherwise it's all free.

What makes Joost different is how it integrates with the social Web. You can open a chat window and jaw with other viewers, e-mail video links to your friends, send IMs via Google Talk, or post a blog entry about what you're watching -- all without leaving the video screen. But it's up to you to find stuff worth talking about.

2. Vuze

In the increasingly crowded field of Webcasters, Azureus's Vuze stands out mostly because its video looks better, thanks to a rich selection of HD content. The other thing that makes Vuze different is that it uses BitTorrent, which makes big downloads much faster (though dicier, too, if your ISP throttles BitTorrent traffic).

Aside from film previews, though, Vuze's content is far from the mainstream. You'll find indie music videos, full-length films like Blood of Ghastly Horror, mashups combining film clips with popular songs, obscure sports (paintball, dune buggy racing), and some "mature" content (such as bikini photo shoots). Most are available for free; some you can rent or buy for $1 to $2.

In most cases you can download or stream the clips and play low-res samples before committing (a good thing, since HD videos soak up 10MB to 50MB per minute). You can also download games such as Eidos's Hitman and play free for 60 minutes before coughing up for the full game. Vuze saves everything to a dashboard that makes finding stuff later easy.

Are you a wanna-be videographer? You can upload your own videos, and then offer them for free, collect a percentage of revenue generated by ads that play along with your clip, or sell your videos and split the take with Vuze. Try doing that with your cable set-top box.

3. Blinkx Broadband Television

Blinkx Broadband TV's content is easily a notch above what you'll find on many cable and satellite stations. Because it uses the Blinkx video search engine to pull content from all over the Web, BBTV offers features, dramas, short films, and comedy sketches you typically might find only on PBS or the Independent Film Channel, if you found them at all. (BBTV also has an adult section that's definitely NSFW.) It didn't have a ton of video available at press time, but what it does offer is generally pretty good. And though BBTV is designed to be ad supported, I didn't see a single commercial in my hours of free viewing.

That's the good news. The bad news is, unlike Joost or Vuze, BBTV's interface looks less like a cable channel guide and more like one designed for a computer. Its menu is organized into six broad categories (such as entertainment, news and info, and sports) with subcategories (animation, comedy, etc.), and then multiple channels within each. Strangely for a service built around a video search engine, there's no way to search for content inside BBTV.

Reprinted with permission from

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