On March 15th, AOL launched their IPTV service In2TV. Available on the In2TV website are about 30 television shows (with currently 10 episodes each) mostly from the 1980s and 90s that you can watch for free, without advertisements. Here is a list of the shows:

+ Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
+ Alice
+ Babylon 5
+ Beetlejuice
+ Chico and the Man
+ Dark Justice
+ Eight is Enough
+ F Troop
+ Falcon Crest
+ Freakazoid
+ Freddy's Nightmares
+ Growing Pains
+ Hanging With Mr. Cooper
+ Head of the Class
+ Histeria
+ Kung Fu
+ La Femme Nikita
+ Lois and Clark
+ Maverick
+ New Adventures of Batman
+ Perfect Strangers
+ Pinky and the Brain
+ Scarecrow & Mrs. King
+ Sisters
+ Spenser for Hire
+ The F.B.I.
+ The Fugitive
+ V
+ Welcome Back Kotter
+ Wonder Woman

To take advantage of this service, all you need a broadband connection, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player 10. Go ahead with the obligatory "Booo!! IE is teh sux0rz!" comments, I'll wait.

I'm a Firefox user myself, and In2TV will work with it if you install the ActiveX plugin... But I just can't think of a reason why you would want to do that. Anyway, with the added installation of a Kontiki-powered plugin, all of the shows are also available in what AOL calls "HD." This is simply NOT true. It's a marked improvement over the regular streams to be sure (1500kbps instead of around 300), and the content is downloaded to your hard drive, so no nasty WMP "Buffering..." messages. But it's hardly HD.

Most of the downloaded episodes are clearly poor transfers from some type of analog tape backup, complete with unsightly artifacts. But they look at least as good as television quality, if not slightly better.

Also, the AOL Hi-Q Video plugin is spyware, being powered as I previously mentioned by the Kontiki Delivery Management System. For those who remember, this is the same Kontiki software that CNET licensed to build their Download Accelerator software a few years back. But it's easily enough removed, if you choose. Just google "KClean.exe" ;)

Kontiki allows their customers (e.g. AOL-TimeWarner) to track which files have been downloaded, viewed or otherwise opened, most likely copied, et cetera. Creepy stuff, no doubt about it, and you would think it would be illegal. But it's a strange world we live in. Currently, the law is more concerned about Viacom maintaining their exclusive rights to redistribute episodes of "Walker, Texas Ranger" than about the consequences of purposefully further insecuring consumers' personal computers to the potential theft of personal and/or financial information.

Anyway... Back to In2TV. The Hi-Q Video player is an embedded instance of WMP10. However, the controls have been disabled and replaced by controls in the webpage. So what does this mean? For one, fast-forwarding and rewinding is somewhat broken. You have to wait for the video to have made it approximately 5% through before FF and RW will work properly. Also, the default WMP pause hotkey is CTRL+P, which also just happens to be the hotkey for printing in IE and every other piece of software ever made. So, no pausing with one command either. First you have to break out of full-screen mode and then click the pause button. Just take my word for it, it's annoying. At least managing your library of downloaded shows is straght-forward enough, but it would have taken some work to screw that up.

Also, as you might have guessed, the content is encoded as WMV10. Which means that (of course) it is governed by WMP DRM and cannot currently be played outside of the Hi-Q player. But also, no Mac or Linux support. Which is just ridiculous.

Well it seems like I've had nothing but bad things to say so far. So what do I think about In2TV?

I love it! Make no mistake, it's very poorly implemented, and a somewhat frustrating user experience. But it's some great television shows on demand, for free. Granted it's not completely on demand because AOL decides what you see, like the cable companies decide their programming schedules. But it's the first digitial distribution model that comes close to getting it right.

When you download an episode of a show, you're granted a license to watch it as many times as you like until June 1, 2006. That may change, but that's the way it works at the moment. If you can't get around to watching the show by then, you need to take a vacation.

Despite all of it's flaws, if you are a fan of any of the Warner-owned shows I listed above, then you should give In2TV a try. Between Babylon 5 and Perfect Strangers I'm loving it, not to mention all the others I haven't even watched yet... In2TV made me realize that I like Babylon 5 enough to go out and buy the DVDs. So, this is also a perfect example of why content owners are fools to not use p2p systems to distribute limited amounts of their IP for free.

Hopefully, in the future they'll decide to actually do some UI design testing and maybe license BitTorrent instead of some spying piece of garbage like Kontiki. Or maybe they'll realize that consumers would be willing to spend $2 to download a DVD-quality episode of a show that they could actually watch on a display larger than their iPod. But that's another post.