Sling Media has officially launched its Sling.com online video portal, which we first checked out a few weeks ago while it was in beta. If you have a Slingbox, this site is all kinds of awesome, because it will allow you to watch live TV streaming from your home on any Windows PC with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

If you don't have a Slingbox, right now Sling.com is just another online video site that has an assortment of TV shows and movies from Fox, NBC, CBS, Sony, MGM, and web content providers like College Humor. Honestly, you can find most, but not all of the same content at Hulu.

Sling does plan to upgade its software so that Mac using Slingbox owners can also stream live TV. But right now anybody with a Flash enabled web browser running Windows, Mac, Linux or something else altogether can watch the web video streams from Sling Media's content partners - provided you're in the US. The content won't play outside of the region.

Online video portal Sling.com is set to open to the public on November 24th. It's currently in private beta, but we got an early peek at the service. The online video player is easy to use, and there's plenty of content from a number of major US television networks as well as ton of videos from web sites like College Humor and 60frames.

While the selection of videos is pretty extensive, that's not really what makes Sling.com special. In fact, the content library looks pretty much like what you can already find at Hulu. That makes sense, since many of the TV episodes and full length videos are coming straight from Hulu.

What makes Sling.com unlike any other online video site is the way it works with the company's Slingbox hardware. If you have a Slingbox plugged into your TV set, cable or satellite box, or TiVo, you can use Sling.com to watch live video over the web. Sling Media has offered the ability to stream video over the internet since the company's inception. But Sling.com allows you to access live, pre-recorded, and web video all in one central location.

If you have a Slingbox, there's plenty of reason to choose Sling.com over Hulu. If not, the case isn't quite as compelling at the moment. Eventually Sling Media plans to roll out social tools that let users do things like record clips of TV shows and movies using a Slingbox and share them with other users at Sling.com. But that feature isn't available yet.

You can watch Sling.com's web videos in pretty much any browser. But if you want to watch live TV, you'll need to be running Windows and using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Mac support is coming soon. I also noticed a glitch during my test that caused Firefox to crash every time I switched from watching a live program to watching web video, and then back to live video again. Hopefully that issue will be worked out by the time Sling emerges from private beta later this month.

Almost a year ago, I suggested that if Microsoft would add support for Hulu to Windows Media Center, it would launch a whole new way for people to watch TV. Web video today is designed for people to watch while sitting hunched over a laptop. But Microsoft and other companies have been putting out media center applications for years that are designed to let you enjoy the media on your computer and from the web from the comfort of your couch.

Now that you can stream full length television episodes from web sites like Hulu, it only seems natural that you should be able to access them using a media center application. Or maybe I just say that because I prefer web video and an HDTV antenna to paying for cable.

Microsoft has yet to add support for Hulu, even though you can watch Hulu videos at the MSN Video site. But the developers behind the open source media center applicaton Boxee have done it. The latest version of Boxee was released today and it adds support for streaming video from CNN, Hulu, CBS, YouTube, and Comedy Central.

Boxee is still in Alpha, and you need to request an invite to install it. The software runs on Mac and Linux, and today's update brings support for the AppleTV. A Windows version is expected soon.

You can see a video of Boxee in action after the break.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

You know how online video site Hulu is working to differentiate itself from YouTube by focusing on professionally produced video from TV networks? Yeah, YouTube's starting to branch out into that territory too now. CBS and YouTube recently began rolling out full length episodes of selected TV shows from the CBS archives.

Right now there's not a ton of content to choose from. Just a few episodes each of Beverly Hills 90210, MacGuyver, Star Trek, and The Young And the Restless.

Unlike typical YouTube videos, these episodes will include pre-roll and interstitional ads, much like the video ads you find at Hulu.

To be honest, it's much harder to find full length TV episodes on YouTube right now than it is on Hulu. A search for "Star Trek" brings up a ton of short clips that you have to sift through to find the 5 full length episodes. But if CBS rolls out more content and if YouTube signs additional partners, perhaps the company will develop a better system for finding TV programs on the site.

[via Advertising Age and Gizmodo]

It's official. We're one step closer to a point where you can throw out your cable box. Not only can you find virtually any TV program you'd ever want to see online thanks to BitTorrent, but legit web sites like Hulu and TheWB.com, and Fancast are making huge libraries of legal, full-length streaming TV episodes available. And now Hulu is prepared to take the next step by streaming tonight's presidential debate (and the October 15th debate) live.

Granted, a live stream of the presidential debate isn't quite as exciting as real-time streaming of popular, network-owned programs like Heroes or 24. But if enough people tune in to watch the debate on Hulu tonight, it could be a powerful demonstration that there's a group of people who want to watch live TV online, not just video-on-demand a day or two after a TV program has already aired on television.

Of course, Hulu isn't the only site that will be streaming debate coverage tonight. As NewTeeVee points out, C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, FOX, Current, CNN, MSNBC, and MySpace will all be streaming tonight's debate. So maybe this isn't so much a first step toward the internet-based future of broadcasting as it is a way for companies to try to build an audience for their online video sites by streaming something that most major networks have access to anyway, and which a lot of Americans plan to watch.

Online video site Hulu now has more than 900 TV and movie titles from over 100 content providers. And to be perfectly honest, it was starting to get a bit tough to find what you were looking for. Now Hulu has rolled out a feature it probably should have had all along: channels.

Channels let you sort videos by genre, including action and adventure, anime, science fiction, comedy, news, and home and garden.

Hulu has also rolled out a few other new features including the ability to conduct searches by actor and discussion forums for particular programs or episodes.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. While using a proxy server might violate the usage license of your ISP or the site you are using, it is as far as I know, not illegal. Still, if you are cautious or in doubt, check with a real lawyer or just refrain from using this type of tool.

For anyone who lives outside the US (or is a US citizen but goes outside the country for vacation), one of the more frustrating aspects of most of the TV streaming services I wrote about earlier is that they are restricted to users accessing the site from the United States. On the flip-side, the BBC's iPlayer is restricted to UK users only, because the BBC is funded by the British public.

OK, fine, I understand the BBC position. If I paid taxes to sponsor the programming, I might be miffed if the rest of the world had free access too. But what if you are a UK resident who happens to go on holiday to another part of Europe? Should you really have to miss "EastEnders?" I say, "no."

So, how do you access sites restricted by location? The same way savvy Chinese users can break pas the Great Firewall of China: proxy servers.

As Internet connections get faster, computer monitors become larger and HTPC integration become more widespread, watching TV shows online has become downright ubiquitous. In the dark ages, like three years ago, the only place you could get truly high-quality copies of TV episodes was to either buy the DVD or to BitTorrent the episode, you know, if one of the big TV groups happens to follow that particular show.

I love tvRSS as much as the next pirate, in the last 18 months, something pretty awesome has happened in regards to commercial television: free web streams. And the quality continues to get better, with each of the major networks offering some kind of HD-experience (iTunes HD tends to be better, but of course, you pay for that privilege).

So here is a list of all the places you can watch current and classic TV shows for free, online. Many of these sites have regional restrictions, based on country. Not to fear, in my next article, I'll discuss how you can access any of these sites (or any region-locked) site, regardless of your physical location.

Here at Download Squad, Hulu has become our favorite way to watch television online. With ever-expanding content choices, good quality and a nice interface, Hulu is almost as good as TV (as long as you live in the United States, that is). One of the few downsides is the need to use a browser to access content. Paul Yanez has created a program that aims to to solve that problem and make Hulu even better.

My Media Player is an Adobe AIR app that is designed to act as a Hulu portal of sorts. Launch the AIR app and you can choose from a categorized list of TV shows and movies available from Hulu. There is also a search function located within the player window so that you can find episodes or shows by title and also clips from Hulu.com

You can resize the application so that it can be docked to the side of the screen (if you want to watch a show while also doing some "real" work) and Paul designed the application to scale to fit a 30" monitor.

One of our favorite features of My Media Player is the ability to search for shows without stopping the program. Instead, the show continues playing in a small window in the left side of the application screen.

We really like the concept behind My Media Player and think it has terriffic potential, but there are a few issues that will probably keep us from using it as our primary method to access Hulu. Because My Media Player works by using the embedded versions of the programs from Hulu.com (Hulu.com allows you to embed all or part of a show onto your own webpage), the quality isn't as high as it is accessing the show directly from the web. And although we really like the ability to dock a Hulu playing window to the side of the screen in a small, unobtrusive size, we wish we had the ability to view the program in full screen. As it stands right now, expanding the window to cover our entire screen is both kludgy and unattractive, due to the aforementioned embedded version issue.

Still, if you want a way to watch shows without having to use your web browser, give My Media Player a shot.

Warner Brothers is broadening its online video strategy. The company recently launched a private beta version of a web site featuring WB television programs from years gone by including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and Friends. There's also a smattering of original content. Now the WB has announced plans to spread the video love through a series of partnerships.

The WB will be launching two web sites, TheWB.com and KidsWB.com. You'll be able to watch videos on those two sites, but the WB will also be distributing content via DailyMotion, Joost, Sling Media, TiVo, and Veoh Networks.

The whole thing actually sounds an awful lot like Hulu, a similar venture started by Fox and NBC. While you can watch videos at Hulu.com, you can also find Hulu content at other online video portals like AOL Video or MSN Video. The WB already distributes a handful of shows through Hulu, but nowhere near the number you'll be able to find at the new web sites.

Honestly, it would have been kind of awesome if the WB had partnered with Hulu so you could find most of the content you were looking for at a single site instead of visiting yet another page to find a video. Fortunately, some of these partners, including Veoh will have partnerships with both Hulu and the WB, which means you may be able to find a one-stop shop. It just won't be managed by Hulu, Fox, NBC, or the WB.

The new channels will launch in mid-September.

It might be time to give up your cable box (If you live in the US anyway). Two of the most popular shows on Comedy Central are coming to Hulu. Sure, you could already watch full length episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at the Comedy Central web site, but we're big fans of one-stop shops around here. And as of today, you can find these programs along with episodes of The Office, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and Starsky & Hutch all in one place. What more could you need?

While Hulu started out as a partnership between Fox and NBC, the company has been steadily adding content partners over the last few months. While CBS, ABC and the CW are nowhere to be seen, you can find some popular TV shows and movies from networks including Sony, MGM, and Warner Brothers.

Hulu will also be adding PBS content later this month, with shows including Nova, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, and Wired Science.

Much to everyone's amazement, Hulu doesn't suck. Seriously. When Fox and NBC first announced plans to get into the online video streaming business, a lot of commenters spent a lot of time talking about how silly it would be to take on YouTube. And then Hulu started showing full length movies and TV shows with minimal advertisements. The video quality is fairly good, and the content library includes things you might actually want to watch. Now, just two months after publicly launching, Hulu reports that:

• The site has served up more than 63 million video streams
• The average Hulu user watches 2 hours of Hulu video each month
• Hulu is now the top network video site

Hulu has also launched a distribution deal with TV.com today, and plans to start streaming video through TVGuide.com, Break.com, Zap2it, BuddyTV, Flixter, and MyYearbook in the next few weeks.

Now for the bad news. Hulu is still completely unavailable to anyone outside of the US.

Online video site Hulu has allowed users to embed videos on other pages pretty much since day one. In fact, a cottage industry has popped up around embedded Hulu videos, although now that the site is out of private beta, there's not much use for sites like TV Paradise and OPENHulu to exist. But now Hulu is getting even more sharing-friendly with the addition of a series of social bookmarking tools.

When you click on a Hulu video, you should notice a new "Share" button on the left side of the video player. Click it and you should see links to MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Windows live, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks. Some of these buttons will let you submit a site for review, while others will let you embed a video. For example, the Digg button lets you submit the video to Digg for voting purposes, while the Facebook button lets you add a video to your profile that visitors can view on your Facebook page.

Hulu has also changed its RSS feeds so that you can now receive videos as enclosures, allowing you to watch them from within your RSS reader.

Online video site Hulu has gotten a lot of good press over the last few months for actually offering up full-length TV shows and movies that you might actually want to watch. There are hundreds of episodes of popular TV shows from networks like Fox and NBC, and movies from partners including Fox, Universal, and MGM. There's just one problem, you can only stream these videos if you live in the US.

That's partially because Hulu only has content licensing and agreements to distribute the content in the US. For the most part, anyone outside of the US who has tried visiting Hulu has gotten an error message. But Emily Turrettini of WatchingTV Online reports that Hulu has finally taken the remarkable step of posting a message that explains why the service is inaccessible and stating that Hulu hopes to go online abroad soon.

There's also an option to signup for email notification as soon as Hulu goes online in your region.

[via NewTeeVee]

Apparently live video streaming isn't the only new feature coming from internet video Joost. Company CEO Mike Volpi tells Portfolio Magazine that the company is also working on a browser-based version of their software.

Right now in order to watch Joost content you need to download and install a standalone application which connects to Joost's peer to peer network. And while Joost has gotten an awful lot of attention for changing the way we think about online video over the last few years, it turns out that a relatively small number of people have actually bothered to install the Joost client, while hundreds of millions of users regularly watch videos in their web browsers.

It's not exactly clear that Joost offers much to pull people away from popular sites like YouTube, Hulu, and DailyMotion. Sure, Joost has full length movies and TV episodes, but so does Hulu, and to be honest, Hulu has far more popular content than Joost.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]