Internet TV is something that I think a lot of people don’t really know about, no, YouTube doesn’t count. I’m talking about TV Channels streamed to your PC over your internet connection it’s something that I have been using for quite a while and find very interesting actaully. Today for review I have a program called Free Internet TV from Holersoft, it offers access to 1200+ streamed TV channels, with that much to offer I sure hope you can find something on to watch. Let’s check this little program out…
Holersoft Version 6.0 Free Internet TV
Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos
Sponsor: Holersoft
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Holersoft Version 6.0 Free Internet TV – Watch 1200 Live TV Channels on Your PC
Free Internet TV allows you to watch 1200 live television channels from 100 countries. There is no need for a TV Tuner card because all the channels are streamed through your Internet connection.
There is no need for a TV Tuner card because all of the channels are streamed through your Internet connection. Free Internet TV is ideal for people interested in alternative programming, learning languages, foreign cultures, entertainment or news.
The most significant Free Internet TV features are:
Various Channels: Channels include sports, entertainment, music, news, talk and education from many different countries. There are even Television based on different languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. These channels are streamed over the Internet for free and do not require any subscription.
Simple and easy to use: Free Internet TV emulates the regular Television set on your PC. All you have to do is select a channel from the list and it will play in the main window. This application does not require any special configurations or settings in order to access all the channels. You can add selected channels to a Favorite list for faster access in the future.
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No additional hardware required: It does not require a TV Tuner card, since these programs are broadcasted over the Internet.
Free Internet TV uses Windows Media Player’s decoding system to present the television and radio signals. Free Internet TV works with any broadband Internet Service Provider (ISP) Worldwide.
Free Internet TV supports resizable screen sizes; you can change the screen window to any size that you want, including full-screen mode. This software comes with free automatic TV station updates so it will never be out of date. It also supports thousands of skins (visual styles) .
About the stations:
Just like a TV set, live Internet television depends on the origin and not on the software that displays the TV images. Some stations can be off line due to their servers’ overload or Internet traffic jams. Not all stations have a 24 Hours schedule. The video quality is dependent on the broadcaster’s own bandwidth; the higher the bandwidth, the better the video quality you will receive. For most TV channels, a modem speed of 56Kb/s is required. For the broadband TV stations, you need 300 Kb/s.
Availability:
Free Internet TV runs under Windows 98/Me/ NT4.0/ 2000/ XP/ 2003 and costs USD$29.95 for lifetime subscription.
The 14-day fully functional evaluation version of the program can be downloaded for free at http://www.Holersoft.net/download/tvsetup.exe (2Mb Only)
Product page link: http://www.Holersoft.net/tv.htm
Download link: http://www.Holersoft.net/download/tvsetup.exe
A Better Look at Things
:
Well Free Internet TV from Holersoft is a downloadable program, so there are no box shots to show you, but I did grab some screenshots of their website to show you. The main page of their site gives you a quick overview of their products.
If you click the ‘Products’ tab, essentially the same thing is seen.
We are concerned with Free Internet TV, so clicking on that brings up a large page with all the spec sand features listed.
Well that’s that… Let’s get into the testing part of all of this….
Installation, Testing and Comparison
Installation is easy, it’s only a 2mb download so even at dial-up speeds it won’t take long. You can use Free Internet TV with Dial-Up access but you won’t have access to all of the channels and the quality isn’t going to be great obviously, there will be a lot of buffering involved. Broadband access is highly recommended for any streaming video/audio to maximize the performance and quality.
Clicking the icon on your desktop the main screen pops up, it let’s you know how many days of the trial you have left, and you can immediately see the channel list on the right side.
The is an extensive help section to Internet Free TV that will explain and answer any questions you might have.
If you look close at the channel names you’ll see the Windows Media Player symbol and also the Real Media Player symbol, the channels with the WMP symbol are the only ones that you can access in Trial mode, and there are a whole lot of them. When you upgrade to the full version all channels are accessible just by double clicking on them. I tried and tried to get screenshots of the actual streaming TV but it just wouldn’t work, so sorry no pictures there.
Holersoft does include a few skins for Free Internet TV, which is nice of them, one of them is shown in the above picture.
Using Free Internet TV is very easy, but don’t expect to get primetime TV, or any ‘real’ TV shows on there. I did come across a couple channels that were actual TV channels that had commercials and were running re-runs of Mayberry RFD and some other old programming, but there are not many of them. I came across a lot of music video channels and religious channels as well, and of course lots of news channels.
I also came across a lot of channels that everything was fast forwarding, and even when I went back to them later they still did the same thing, I couldn’t figure out what the problem is.
Another thing is that not all the channels actually worked, now this is most likely do to the channel itself being offline as not all channels broadcast 24 hours a day.
I did come across a lot of interesting stuff in the channel list, and speaking of channel list, I’m sure you want to know the list, they break it down by country, which is nice, but there are 1279 channels in the list and if I list them all here it would add many essentially pointless pages to this review.
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The easiest thing for you to do is to go here and check out the channel list for yourself. http://www.holersoft.net/channellist.htm
Overall Free Internet TV is pretty cool for what it is and does, I still haven’t had the time to get through every channel, I just don’t have the time to sit there and click channels, I thought I would but time just isn’t something I can spare.
Here is one of the screenshots from the Holersoft site to give you an idea of how it works.
Summary:
So, Free Internet TV from Holersoft does what it claims, although the name ‘Free’ is a bit deceiving, it makes you think that the software is free but it is actually the channels that are free, so it is basically a play on word of sorts. There are other options out there I have run across, but not any with so many channels in one package with the options that are also available to the user. The interface is very easy to use and built to be user friendly.
DragonSteelMods gives Holersoft Free Internet TV a 4 out of 5 score.
Pros:
-LOTS of channels
-Very small software package
-Inexpensive
-Configurable
Cons:
-The name is a bit misleading