Download Squad

There are a variety of ways to purchase content. Some channels offer a subscription model where you can pay a monthly fee to download and watch as many programs as you'd like. Of course, if you stop paying for your subscription you'll no longer be able to watch those episodes. So you also have the option of paying to download and keep individual episodes or entire seasons of content.

Some channels don't include a subscription option. While you can purchase individual episodes of Dexter or download an entire season, you cannot simply subscribe to the Showtime channel. It's up to content providers to determine pricing and payment options for each channel.



You can start watching videos using the SyncTV player shortly after your download begins. Video quality is respectable. SyncTV users H.264 video compression and can support 5.1 surround sound. There's no HD content yet, but SyncTV has plans to add HD video in the future.



One of the most impressive features of SyncTV is that you will be able to install the client on up to 5 computers and watch licensed content on up to 10 portable devices. Right now there are no portable clients, so you can only install the software on your Mac, Windows, or Linux machines. But eventually it's possible we could see iPod, PSP, Windows Mobile, and other clients.

We tested SyncTV on Windows and Linux. While Windows installation was a breeze, we ran into a few snags using Ubuntu 7.10, which is the only officially supported Linux distribution at the moment (although the installer may work on other distros). First off, the installer is a .package file. If you haven't run into one of these before, you may not be aware that you need to adjust the package's file permissions to set it as executable. Otherwise clicking on the icon will just bring up an error message letting you know that the file can't be opened by your text editor.



Once we got SyncTV up and running on Ubuntu, the client looked pretty much identical to the Windows version. But when we clicked the menu button attempting to login to the SyncTV server so we could browse and download content the application simply closed. We're not ruling out human error here, but it would be nice if there were at least some installation instructions on the download page.


Overall SyncTV has a compelling vision. We love that SyncTV will offer multiple ways to pay for content, true cross-platform support (even if it's a bit buggy at the moment), and the ability to watch content on a whopping ten portable devices. But SyncTV faces several challenges.

First, the company really needs to sign some more content partners because right now SyncTV makes Joost's B-list content library look compelling. Second, while there is no clear leader in the online video distribution space, it's not going to be easy for an unknown company to go up against the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. And finally, as Apple, Sony, TiVo, and Microsoft continue to blur the lines between the PC and TV by developing set top boxes capable of accessing downloaded and web content, SyncTV is for computers and portable devices only at the moment. We'd love to see the company work on a method for delivering video to a TV set through TiVo, Apple TV, or video game console plugins.