http://www11.alluc.org/alluc/tv-shows/
http://tv-links.co.uk (taken down Oct 19, 2007)
My friend Rhianfa recommended these excellent sites as the best ones for
complete seasons of a huge variety of tv shows. Brilliant!
Episode Guide- 'Heroes' Report Card: We Grade All 23 Episodes
I'm not a huge tv watcher, except for hockey, but I did enjoy the series 'Heroes" last year. In preparation for the new season, EW has reviews and plot summaries for each of the debut season's episodes. Good stuff!
Rick Steves' Europe: Blog Gone Europe
Rick Steves does a travel show about Europe on American public TV, as well as a series of European travel books. His free guide to traveling Europe by train is the best, and it's also essential reading for choosing which tickets and rail passes to buy. He has tons of great tips!
He travels extensively through Europe, striving to show you the way through the "back door". That is, he tries to help you experience Europe like a native, and show you the secrets that only the locals know about, and his advice is invaluable.
Instead of waiting for the TV show or one of the guide books, keep up to date with Rick Steves on his blog. Rick is currently in Croatia.
Today's Link source: Rick Steves email notices
Joost
Skype totally disrupted the long-distance calling industry with free phone calls over the internet. Now the founders of Skype have started a new enterprise, Joost. Joost aims to do for TV over the internet, what Skype did for long distance calls.
Imagine Youtube with real "tv shows" from real television, combined with internet user content. It's full-screen on your computer, and on-demand, so you can watch it anytime you want. It's for Mac and Windows. And it's free, like television should be. Joost currently has channels from Canada's Much Music, poker tournaments, Ministry of Sound , Vancouver's Nettwerk record label, World's Strongest Man, Fight Network, documentaries, videos and more. Maybe it's not "essential" TV yet, but I'm sure more content will be added all the time.
They started under the code name "The Venice Project". At the moment they are in beta-mode, so you have to sign-up and wait for them to offer you the software to download. I got accepted yesterday, downloaded the software and I'm pretty impressed. The software works really well and the video quality looks really good. This is going to be huge!
Best TV listings for Canadians: Sympatico / MSN TV Listings/ TV Guide
Mrs. Linkjockey doesn't like me flipping through every single channel, trying to find something interesting to watch on the boob tube, and the local cable company's listing is too slow for me. Yesterday, I saw a review of all the TV listings sites on the Internet... for Americans. You enter your postal code, and the sites tell you what's on television in your area. None of the sites worked for Canadian postal codes. None.
So I did some of my own research, and discovered that the best results for me, the best TV listings for Canadians comes from old reliable TV Guide . They show listings for cable, digital cable, satellite providers and antenna for your postal code, over a 2 hour window. They show all the channels on the same window, and if you click on the name of a show, you get a little synopsis. In other words, they provide everything you're looking for, without actually streaming the show to you.
Honourable mention: Canadian Cable Listings from TV Times
If your TV provider isn't listed on TV Guide, TV Times may have a better selection of TV providers. The only downside is that they only show 20 channels at once. And my dad was telling me that TV magazines are dying.
Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Gallactica beat broadcast TV
Want to know where broadcast TV is heading?
This hour-long talk by Mark Pesce in Australia discusses tons and tons of opportunities for advertisers; TV, film and video producers and media companies created because of the explosion of Bit Torrent (peer-to-peer) video downloads. There are just so many new opportunites for marketing companies, advertisers, media producers, broadcasters, and new ways to distribute video (not just Youtube, either).
Once again, it looks like the huge media companies have it all backwards. Instead of trying to reinforce and tightly control the current system with increasingly strict copyright restrictions; they could be trying out all these new opportunities.
Oh yeah, did I mention that VideoSift is a pretty good online video aggregator?
