As I mentioned yesterday, internet movie channel Epix launched this weekend. The TV channel is available to Verizon FiOS customers, who can also login to the EpixHD web site to watch dozens of movies including new releases such as Iron Man and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as well as older, more obscure titles including Bubba Ho Tep and Son of Rambow.

If you don't have Verizon FiOS you can request a 3-day weekend trial of the service, but I'm not entirely sure what the point is, since Epix doesn't plan to launch a web-only version anytime soon. Perhaps they're hoping you'll contact your local cable, satellite, or other TV provider and request they add Epix to the lineup.

If your invitation hasn't come through yet, you can take solace in the fact that I did score an invite. OK, that may not be much comfort, but I did manage to grab a bunch of screenshots of the user interface. It's kind of a mixed bag right now. The search function works quite nicely and you can click the watch button from the drop-down menu that appears when you're searching for a movie -- if the movie is available. Unfortunately, there are a ton of listings for movies that you can't actually watch yet, including Star Trek, GI Joe, and The Godfather I, II, and III.

You can also browser for movies by most watched, newest, genre, or other collections. You can also see all the movies from A to Z.

Browsing is sort of a cumbersome task though, since you have to scroll through thumbnails of movie posters. If it's not clear what movie you're looking at, you can mouse over the cover to see the title, but it may take a moment for the title to show up. And in the genre section, many movies are listed more than once (for example, the same title might show up in comedy, award winners, and action). And it's clear the web site wasn't really designed for geeks, because the sci fi category is dead last, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling before you get to it.

On the bright side, video quality was pretty good and you can even click a button to check your bitrate and other settings, which are automatically adjusted based on your internet connection settings.

If you're not a FiOS customer, you can still request an invite to check out the service. Just sign up at EpixHD.com/invite and you'll register for a 3-day weekend trial of the internet-only service. The invites are being given out on a first come first, served basis, so you might not get one right away. But Epix plans to offer invitations between now and Thanksgiving.

Epix is run by Viacom, Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM, so the company has access to a decent collection of movies, although it looks like most of the titles available at launch are older movies.

[via NewTeeVee]

Online video site Hulu has begun adding content from TV network ABC to its site. Hulu and ABC's parent company Disney announced a partnership deal back in April, but today is the first day you can actually find ABC content on Hulu... just not very much of it.

Hulu is starting with Grey's Anatomy, and has plans to roll out other shows including Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show over the next few weeks. Sure, it'd be nice if all this stuff were available on day one, but it's summertime and there aren't as many new episodes of existing shows to add to the site, so I can see why Hulu would want to drag things out a bit.

Now if only the company could snag some CBS and CW content...

NBC has relaunched its NBC Direct video download service. Honestly, ever since Hulu launched, I haven't thought much about NBC Direct, which I first covered back in 2007. There aren't any videos available from NBC Direct that you can't find on Hulu, and the clunky DRM and download application make NBC Direct much more difficult to use than the web based player.

Still, NBC Direct has two advantages over Hulu or other online video sites:

1. You can watch videos while you're not connected to the internet
2. Videos are available in high definition

There are a few caveats: The NBC Direct player is Windows only. Question number 1 in the FAQ is whether there are plans for a Mac version. NBC's answer? Use Boot Camp to install WIndows on your Mac. And while the videos you download look like normal FLV Flash video files, NBC uses DRM which means that videos will stop playing at some date in the future. And you can only watch videos on the computer you used to download them.

The downloads are pretty speedy. NBC uses peer to peer technology which you can off if you're willing to deal with "standard quality" videos instead of the "high quality" versions that are available to P2P users.
[via NewTeeVee]

The team behind open source internet video player Miro have pushed out version 2.0. The new player features a new interface, improved speed and performance, and the ability for users to add links to online streaming video portals like Hulu and CBS.com to the sidebar.

Unlike other internet video players which are primarily focused on offering streaming video content, Miro is built for downloading videos. This means you can typically watch higher quality videos and you can watch your movies when you're offline. You can subscribe to any video podcast with an RSS feed, browse for videos in the Miro Guide, or download YouTube videos.

First came pirated copies of TV shows being traded over the internet by fans the BBC iPlayer service which lets UK residents watch any TV program that's aired in the last seven days. Now the BBC plans to stream BBC1 content live over the internet.

The new streaming service will go live sometime int he next few months. The BBC already streams content from several of its news channels live, but this will be the first time you'll be able to watch live TV from the BBC's flagship channel on the web.

You'll need a broadband internet connection to watch. And you'll also also need to pay the same £139.50 annual license fee that you pay to watch television in the UK. Critics complain that it could be tricky for the BBC to enforce that policy, which means that television owners could wind up subsidizing the content watched by people who own a computer but no television set. But officials charged with enforcing the TV licensing policy say they have ways to catch moochers. All of which means that we probably won't be tuning into BBC1 over the internet in the US any time soon.

thanks Omar!

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]

Because the world didn't already have enough internet TV applications bringing you B-list movies and video podcasts, online video site Blinkx has entered the fray. Blinkx Broadband TV has all the usual bells and whistles including the ability to stream high quality video from the internet, watch in fullscreen, and browse through a list of "channels" with independent films, comedy clips, movie trailers, and the like. In other words, good luck finding any content you've actually heard of.

The one thing that sets Blinkx BBTV apart from the competition is that it incorporates Blinkx's speech recognition technology. While this feature isn't available in every video, when you click on the little dialog button in the toolbar in certain videos, you'll get a list of lines spoken in the film. Click on a line of dialog and you'll automatically jump to that point.

The application also features IMDB integration. What that means is you can pull up the information window on selected videos, and click on actors, directors, genres, and other information to bring up their IMDB pages in an in-application browser window.

Is Blinkx BBTV a Joost killer? Honestly, if anyone is a Joost killer these days, it's Joost. The company started out with a lot of buzz, but hasn't managed to sign the content partnerships necessary to keep viewers coming back. While Blinkx BBTV and many similar services present a nice tool for watching internet video, it's still not clear if there's a huge market for internet video that isn't watched in a browser or downloaded to a portable device.

Netflix customers have had the option to watch selected videos on a PC without waiting for a DVD to show up in the mail since earlier this year. But up until recently there were three major restrictions on the service:

1. It only works with Windows.
2. You could only watch a limited number of hours of programming per month.
3. The selection was on the small and obscure side.

While the service is still Windows-only, several users have reported that Netflix is addressing the other two issues. Netflix is sending out emails letting customers know that there are no longer monthly restrictions on how many shows they can watch. The email also states that Netflix now has over 6,000 movies and TV episodes available, which is about twice the number the service seems to have had this summer.
[via Zatz Not Funny]

Adobe has launched a new standalone media player that's a bit like a cross between Miro and Adobe Digital Editions. While Adobe's Flash player for web browsers has become the default media utility for viewing online video in a browser, it seems like there's a mad dash to create standalone media browsers.

The reasoning is sound: Web browsers are meant for viewing text and images. Multimedia was kind of an afterthought, so why not build a new media browser from the ground up. We're not sure people are rushing to download standalone applications like Joost, Babelgum, Miro, or VeohTV, but nobody wants to be left out in the cold if these things do take off.

Adobe's entry is built on Adobe AIR, so you'll need to install AIR before you can run Adobe Media Player. Fortunately, even though the application is still in beta, there's a handy web-based installer that does the heavy lifting for you. Click one button, check a few boxes, and you're all set.

We wish we could say we were as impressed with the media player as with the installer. The application was slow to load, video playback was choppy (although not quite as choppy as in the screencast above, which was recorded at 12 frames per second), and there's no way to browse for more videos without pausing the one you're currently viewing.

For a beta product Adobe Media Player's not bad. We like the overall menu system and the easy to read graphics. But we like our media players a bit more responsive. Some original content would be nice too.

Defying all conventional logic, Joost has upgraded its internet TV client to version 1.0 -- and it's still in beta. That means you can only download Joost 1.0 if you're a current beta tester, or if you know someone kind enough to send you an invitation.

There are a few new features and performance tweaks in Joost 1.0 beta, including a modified user interface, larger icons, and the ability to customize your interface by dragging and dropping channel thumbnails.

Joost 1.0 is also supposed to work better on slow networks and will try to restart stalled video streams. Probably the best news is that the developers have finally included an updater service, meaning you won't need to download an installer file every time an update is released. But honestly, the latest version of Joost still appears a bit buggy to wear a 1.0 label. At the very least, this should be considered Joost 1.0 RC1.

The Joost team also reports that you'll need to install and run Joost 1.0 as an administrator if you're running Windows Vista, which is all well and good, but we were unable to get the program to work properly on our Vista system. It starts up just fine, and will resume the last video you were watching. But when you try to pull up a channel menu in order to switch videos, nothing happens.

Update: It looks like Joost has added a download link to their front page, meaning the public beta has begun. No more invitations needed. Also, a few days into the beta, we noticed that our difficulty pulling up the channel guide has disappeared. Perhaps it was a network congestion issue, but the beta seems to be working well now. And finally, Joost has added links to featured content to their web page. Want to watch La Femme Nikita episodes? Just click the "play now" button to launch Joost and the show will begin to play.

[via eFluxMedia]

If you want to rent a video, you can go to pretty much any video store and walk out with a movie of your choice. It doesn't matter what studio produced that film.

But if you want to watch streaming video of network television programs, you either need to visit the network's website or find a site that streams pirated copies.

It looks like that could be changing. Increasingly we're seeing networks offer up programming on sites like MySpace, Yahoo!, and AOL. You know, pretty much anywhere but YouTube.

Today ABC and this blog's parent company AOL have announced an agreement to stream ABC programs through AOL's video portal. You'll still be able to watch recent episodes at ABC.com, but if you want to watch free, advertising-supported videos from ABC, CBS, and several other channels, you can visit AOL. While we work for AOL here at Download Squad, our dream is that one day streaming video will be more like video rental stores. You'll be able to visit the portal of your choice and watch all the video you want.

ABC will offer about four episodes of popular programs at a time on AOL's video site. AOL and ABC will split the advertising revenue. Meanwhile, NBC and News Corp are preparing to launch their own video portal, possibly within the next few weeks. NBC also plans to launch a service that lets users download free programs that can be watched within one week of their original broadcast date.