Audio/Video Streaming

Take Advantage Of Online Media

So you’re out on the road for business, and one of your evenings isn’t filled with dinner with clients or co-workers. You can’t really justify a taxi ride into the city for some adventure or, even worse, you’re in a town with absolutely no adventure whatsoever. But the good news is, you do have your trusty notebook computer and the hotel has high-speed Internet access. Guess what that means? It means you now have access to virtually limitless sources of news, sports, and entertainment! So say goodbye to boredom and hello to the exciting and wonderful world of streaming content.

There are a few prerequisites for accessing streaming media across the ‘Net. The most important of these is a media player. The good news: Almost every Windows-based PC comes equipped with the free Windows Media Player, which is capable of playing MPEG, AVI, and WMV formats for video, as well as almost every audio format available. There might be a cause for other media players, however. Most notable of these is Apple’s QuickTime media player, freely available from quicktime.apple.com. Some other sites might require RealMedia’s Real Player, which you can get from www.real.com free of charge. Real also has a paid offering called SuperPass, which we’ll discuss in detail later in this article.

News

Recently, CNN.com bucked the norm and made all of its video content available for free. Not only does it carry video feeds for each major story for the day, it also has a feed that is updated hourly with the most current updates on news items. To access the feeds at CNN.com, all you need to do is click any video link next to a news story. This will bring up the feed player, providing easy access to every stream available at the current moment via the table of contents on the right.

You can view available feeds by relevance to the current video you are watching or by the top-viewed video streams for the day by clicking Top Video. If you’d like to see a simple list of all available video, along with associated popularity ranks, runtime length, and the time it was updated, you can just click Browse in the video tab and see everything available to you at once.

CNN.com’s move to free video prompted all the other major news organizations to follow suit, so you can also catch free video throughout the day from FoxNews.com, MSNBC.com, ABC News (abcnews.go.com), and CBSNews.com. Even The Weather Channel (www.weather.com) has begun offering streaming video of its top weather stories updated every few hours from its site, absolutely free of charge.

For a less bandwidth-intensive option, National Public Radio (www.npr.org) provides a 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week live radio stream from its Web site for free. Even if you don’t have a high-speed Internet connection, NPR’s radio stream comes across loud and clear.

There is a paid offering from Real Network called Real SuperPass which offers access to premium content feeds, usually updated more often than the free content on most sites. A few examples of such feeds are live broadcasts of “Good Morning America” on ABC News and live streaming news from the BBC, as well as premium content from any of the 55 video clients it services. This feature costs $12.99 a month, but you can preview it free for 14 days.




Sports

ESPN (espn.go.com) is essentially your one-stop sports Web site. It has video, audio, and updates of every game in every sport, live video archives of the highlights of yesterday’s games and biggest sports news stories, games, and even it’s own radio station. ESPNRadio.com is a 24/7 sports-only radio station that streams in real time. Whether you’re looking for scores and updates or a detailed, play-by-play analysis of yesterday’s playoff games, ESPNRadio.com delivers it clearly and doesn’t require high speed to access.

On game day, ESPN runs real-time, live-updating sports monitors for each team and each game. These monitors are not video or audio, so they require no plug-ins whatsoever. The updates are instantaneous; when the NHL’s Ilya Kovalchuk scores a goal for his Atlanta Thrashers at 9:35 in the first period, you see the score and all associated stats update in real time, without having to refresh the browser.

ESPN also offers live game video feeds for a fee. For example, MLB.TV (go to www.mlb.com and click Video), the feed site for Major League Baseball, is $3.95 for a day, $14.95 a month, or $29.95 for the season. Or, if you’re on a limited entertainment budget and only need to hear the action, you can sign up for an entire season’s worth of audio feeds for every single team in the Major Leagues for just $7.95. Similar packages exist for the NFL, NBA, and NHL; refer to the site for details.

Fox Sports has a similar system in its Fox Sports Mobile application, a free download from msn.foxsports.com. Once running, you get live updates via direct feed into the application. You can also access video clips of game highlights both during the game and once it’s over.

Entertainment

There are two Web sites of note in the streaming video arena that carry some highly entertaining content on the Internet: Ifilm.com and Atomfilms.com. Both of these sites carry video clips and short films; however, each has its own specialization.

Ifilm tends to carry more “viral video” content, high profile videos of commercials, clips, cartoons, and other media that have created a buzz, while Atom Films leans more toward interactive content and preview clips. After Atom Films acquired Shockwave.com, it inherited a ton of interactive video games playable from your Web browser, giving you hours upon hours of boredom elimination. And if you’re looking for independently created shows and serialized screenplays to while away the ticking of the clock, Ifilm’s independent creators are just what you’re looking for.

If you’re looking to go down a truly independent track, you could check out the user-streamed broadcasts on Winamp TV. You can download the free Winamp media player at www.winamp.com; it has a tremendous userbase and support structure. One of the things that makes Winamp such a draw is that users can set up streaming audio and video servers from the comfort of their own homes and broadcast whatever suits their fancy. While this does tend to produce a few interesting specimens, there are also some incredibly entertaining streams that come across, such as live television from Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan, or user-created films/music videos that, if nothing else, provide hours of unintentional humor.

There are also thousands of user-created radio stations available through Winamp, each featuring a wild assortment of content suited for every taste imaginable. Fans of the television network Comedy Central will be delighted to know that its Web site (www.comedy central.com) features video clips from all of its premiere shows, updated each week. Each show’s classic moments are archived for later access, allowing you to see the legendary roast of Pam Anderson and classic lines from “The Man Show.”

Looking to catch up on previews of the latest movies? Apple features a movie trailer Web site (apple.com/trailers) which catalogues trailers from both upcoming releases and movies that have already been released. The collection of clips available from Apple is nothing short of vast, so even though a movie has already been released, you can determine if you want to spend your hard-earned money on it or not by heading here and watching the trailer.

Music/Radio

If music is your first choice for entertainment, there’s a massive repository of streaming music videos available through Yahoo! LAUNCHcast (launch.yahoo.com). Just about every genre of music is represented here, from country-and-western to hip-hop and pop to heavy metal. You can search through music video archives and find the videos you used to watch in your youth (usually behind your parents’ backs), even from artists you’d never imagine would be archived. Relive the glory days of U2 performing at Red Rocks, screeching hair metal, and plaid-filled grunge right from your Web browser. If visual stimulation isn’t really your preference, LAUNCHcast offers audio streams of all the songs you remember, plus the new material of the day.

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Speaking of streaming audio, there are literally thousands of audio-only radio streams available on the ‘Net. The absolute largest selection of such broadcasts is found at Live365 (www.live365.com), the world’s largest Internet radio network. This one Web site is home to over 3,000 radio streams, each one playing its own format of music, talk, comedy, religious, or other themed broadcast. You can browse stations by format, sample play list, name, or broadcaster handle, or perform a keyword search to find exactly what you’re looking for.

There are several very notable radio stations broadcasting on the Web today. The most legendary in terms of both innovation and notoriety is WOXY 97x (www.woxy.com). You may remember hearing about this radio station in the movie Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ray, repeated the station’s slogan “97x… BAM! The future of rock n’ roll” ad nauseum throughout the film. In 1998, WOXY 97x began simulcasting its broadcast across the Internet and in 2004 became the world’s first terrestrial radio station to move to an Internet-only format. Other notable radio broadcasts to be found on the web include alternative and ambient WFUM 91.1 (www.wfmu.org), New Orleans’s jazzy WWOZ (www.wwoz.org), Atlanta’s Classic 96Rock (www.96rock.com), and Nashville’s WSM (www.wsmonline.com), the official station of the Grand Ole Opry and a country music legend.

Talk radio has found a fairly broad audience on the Internet, as well. Air America (wwwairamericaradio.com), a left-leaning political radio station, made headlines in 2004 with its free Internet broadcast of its talk format station. Its stream is available free on the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On the other side of the political spectrum, Rush Limbaugh archives each of his daily shows on his Web site, RushLimbaugh.com. Each of his shows is available the following day for free. And rounding out the political spectrum is Neal Boortz, the high profile Libertarian radio host whose live broadcast is found every day from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on WSBRadio.com.

If politics isn’t for you but you still yearn to hear someone speaking on the radio, Coast To Coast with George Noory (www.coasttocoastam.com) just might appeal to you. This legendary show once (and still occasionally) hosted by Art Bell features the who’s who of weirdos, conspiracy theorists, alien abductees, and other odd folks nightly. There are archives of past shows dating all the way back to early 2002, ensuring a virtually neverending source of entertainment. Trust us, if you want to make a dull evening interesting, a Coast To Coast show will do it.

As you can see, there’s no need to sit bored in your hotel room while on the road for business. Just keep your computer by your side and connect to the Internet, where a world of entertainment options awaits you.

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by Joe Peacock