TVU's alright, it's probably one of the more user-friendly IPTV solutions.
I've used this kind of IPTV streaming on occasion in the past few years to
get feeds of F1 races (to watch the F1 whilst I was at uni where I didn't
have a TV or even TV signal (!)) or to watch american networks like the US
Comedy Central, or the US Discovery Channel.. I don't use it every day
though, whilst some people do.
TVants is still my personal favourite because it's based around the
bittorrent protocol of data distribution but has a really technical,
geek-friendly interface, but TVU seems to work quite well. There's loads of
other apps available, like Sopcast, PPMate, UUSEE, most of which use the
same kind of system, but they're either in cryptic Japanese/Chinese
languages, not translated at all, or are really buggy or show loads of
popups.
TVU's integrated interface is really quite nice, with the chat window
alongside the video feed, and the channel guide with the bookmarking
facility... It's a little chunky at the moment in terms of design, and could
be improved, but the core functionality's there.
TechCrunch discussed many of these options back in July;
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/13/live-p2p-television-streaming-now -
though I wish Zattoo would open its doors to people in the UK outside of the
people in their private trials! Every time I've tried to register it just
says "sorry, not available in your country yet" - even if I try a Swiss
proxy. Though, saying that, I went onto the site just now and it invited me
to put my name down to register for an invite... So who knows. I find it
ironic that they're streaming a good chunk of the BBC FTA bouquet, yet we
can't even download the client for that. (They have different channel
packages for different countries; I remember them offering BBC World for
overseas viewers IIRC.) Maybe someone at the BBC could give them a poke and
ask them to hurry up with their UK offering ;)
