Watch TV Stations From The World Around: Online TV Player

Online TV Player allows you to view, in a geographically organized way, over 850 TV channels from around the world. And these are not simply non-profit or educational channels. There are full-fledged TV feeds from major TV stations in nearly 100 different languages (over 100 countries covered).

I have been watching news from Puerto Rico, thai boxing tournaments from Thailand, late night talk shows from Saudi Arabia and documentaries from Sri Lanka and South Korea, just to name a few of the many I have seen.

The quality varies a great deal but it is overall beyond what my general expectations were when I first downloaded this shareware trial.

 

 

The application is extremely simple to use, with no menus and only a few very basic command buttons.

Video streams can be run at standard, double or full screen mode.

The Online TV Player requires you to have Windows Media Player and Real Player installed, as these (Windows Media and Real) are also the video formats in which all of the accessible TV channels broadcast/stream their signal.

I personally find it quite amazing to spend some time to watch different people and TV programming from around the world with such ease. Though I have had satellite television around for a few years, I found the experience altogether new.

Though on satellite television it is possible indeed to see quite a few channels from far countries around the world, at least with my satellite connection I had no clear organization of such channels, unless I invested time in organizing them myself through a complex remote control device. The beauty of the Online TV Player is that it has organized and aggregated all of these channels under a geographical categorization. So if I want to see the news from China, blam, I hit the China folder and I get over 20 TV channels from China which I can immediately try to access.

For each channel it is indicated the name and the bandwidth at which the video has been encoded (from 40Kbps to over 800Kbps). That means that you need to have at least the same amount of bandwidth to smoothly playback the video. You will notice in fact that if you select videos that have been encoded at a larger bandwidth than the one you have available the video portion will stop frequently and won't be able to keep up and in synch with the audio part.

On any one night you can sweep around and see how much difference of coverage there is between news channels in different and distant countries. It is often amazing to admire how US top headlines are not even covered within many of the worldwide country-based national channels.

Watching the world, even though from the narrow and often manipulated mainstream media channels is often illuminating.

Nonetheless it appears as a no challenging technical invention, the very simplicity of this shareware which opens up a door into peeking into the world TV media eyes, country by country, is an excellent opportunity for learning, studying and understanding people differences, cultures, communication approaches and a lot more.

Online TV Player also free access to over 1500 radio stations from around the world.

These are the pros offered by this program:

• Great geographically categorized list of TV stations.


• Extremely ease to operate. Click and see.


• Can add preferred stations to a list of favorites with one click.


• Can view the video at double size and even in full screen mode.

Clearly, all of these TV stations are accessible also from their own web sites. The advantage here in fact is in having a simple and unthreatening interface to access easily any preferred channel with just a click of the mouse.

What you are paying for (if you decide to contribute) is the time someone else has spent in finding and aggregating together all these Internet TV channels, while adding to it a reliable and stupid-proof video player.

Cons: Many channels are often inaccessible.
Connection time for each one channel may vary from 10-15 to 40-50 seconds or more (depending largely on the quality of your own Internet connection).

System requirements: Windows XP, 2000, 98 + RealPlayer 6 or higher and Microsoft Media Player 7 or higher

15-day free trial. Shareware.

Full price: $ 29.98
No Monthly Fees, No Extra Costs.

Download it here: http://www.onlinetvplayer.com/download.htm