Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

ABC.com and CBS.com now offer full screen streaming of their prime time shows. All four major U.S. networks offer some type of free streaming for their marquee shows, but ABC and CBS are unique in that they offer a full screen version. I watched the latest episode of Lost (that Juliet sure is sneaky) on ABC.com and was impressed with the quality of the video. Watching at a resolution of 1920 by 1200, the episode was comparable to the quality of a downloaded “high definition” DIVx file. The only drawback is that it is not a true full screen but keeps a small border around the picture. In dark scenes, the black portion of the background has noticeable pixelation.

This is a smart move by ABC and CBS to capture more viewers and make piracy less attractive. Typically, any show I missed and forgot to record, I would download as a torrent file. In fact, I did that for the first 4 episodes of Lost of season one, which I originally missed. Lost rarely airs repeats so ABC.com is a good way to catch up with the show. One caveat is that I had a hard time getting the new ABC player to work properly in Firefox. I finally gave up and watched it using Internet Explorer. The streaming video at ABC.com also requires Flash 8.0 while CBS uses Real Player to stream.