Livestation adds more TV channels, Linux and Mac clients

Filed under: Internet, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Beta

Livestation adds more TV channels, Linux and Mac clients

by Brad Linder Oct 5th 2008

It's been a while since we looked at Livestation, a video player that allows you to watch live streams of TV channels, with a heavy emphasis on news programming. While the channel selection was rather limited in February, there are now over a thousand channels to choose form, thanks to user submitted links to channels that stream live TV signals. Most are still news related, but there are also a handful of channels of music and other genres.

Another major change is that Livestation is now cross-platform. There are Windows, Mac, and Linux clients available. The Linux version works best on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, while the OS X version should run on any Mac with an Intel processor. The Windows version also no longer requires Silverlight to be installed.

The user interface has also been tweaked, making it simpler to search through the long list of channels or flip between channel presets. If the video window looks small in the screenshot, all you have to do is double click on any video to watch in full screen.

While Hulu, Joost, and other online video sites are focusing on offering video on demand, Livestation provides a decent way to watch live programming. And there are two things that most people would rather watch live than pre-recorded, news and sports. Since there's a lot more money involved in getting broadcast and webcast rights for live sporting events, I doubt we'll be seeing ESPN or similar channels on Livestation any time soon. But if you want to catch the latest BBC, CNN, or Bloomberg news, Livestation's got you covered.

[via MakeUseOf]

Tags: livestation, news, online-video, streaming

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Vadim Peretokin said 2:08PM on 10-05-2008

Well, finally something that works in Canada, heh.

Ubuntu installation was quite smooth, and it seems to be working okay. My only prob is that the window in non-fullscreen mode doesn't wobble :-/

miggols99 said 1:54PM on 10-05-2008

You can probably fix that by turning off skin mode. Go to Options > Preferences and untick "Skin Mode".

Jash Sayani said 3:01PM on 10-05-2008

Using it since months... Slow Buffering and very few channels !!

chrisaroz said 3:57PM on 10-05-2008

Wasn't there some Peer-2-Peer Live TV streaming software talked about a while back? Basically people with TV Tuners could offer up there channels to others... I still like that idea better since it would have every channel, but I can't seem to find it.

John said 4:58PM on 10-05-2008

Mac OSX without intel proc's also work great.

Some stations will stop playing sometimes simply, click on play on the station again, it seems to startup again.

There is a european p2p tv tuner program called Zootoo or something like that...

Samuel said 10:27PM on 10-05-2008

Microsoft GUI designers must be rioting, everything design wise is taken from the Mac now and ported for personal use, look at this, its the same with an internet BBC project for podcasts (but this is a better, if not later, incarnation).

samflutch said 9:22AM on 10-06-2008

The Linux version works best on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, while the OS X version should run on any Mac with an Intel processor. The Windows version plus no longer requires Silverlight to be installed.
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Samflutch
internet marketing

asho said 1:07PM on 10-06-2008

I've used Livestation, and removed it. It seems to be just a collection of stream links. I'd rather just have the links so I can play them in my player of choice, rather than yet another crap player. And I found that once I figured out what those URLs are, they work fine in (e.g.) KMPlayer.

asho said 1:11PM on 10-06-2008

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