Friday, April 20, 2012

Virtual TV Set / Announcement

If you've been following this blog, you would have noticed my obsession over "online TV" recently, brought along by the fact that I'm in a country where there is no free TV in English or in my native language. So what I did was I turned to the web. But then, I wanted all my favorite shows all in one place. Right now, some are on Vimeo, some on YouTube or UStream, and so on. And sometimes, I don't want to even think of what to watch next. You know, like watching actual TV. And so I made my own "virtual" TV set that, as of today, already has nearly 40 channels! And I call it rTV. Check it out on ronjie-tv.blogspot.com today.

Additionally I put all videos I linked to here on RAW into a playlist, and now in fact that is one of the channels on rTV. The RAW TV channel already has more than 17 hours of programming inclusive of 200 videos from July 2010 to April 2012, averaging 5 minutes in length. Check out the RAW TV channel on rTV.

200 is actually the limit in YouTube playlists, so I'm already starting to build up a "follow-up" channel, R2. As of today, there's already more than 1 hour worth of videos on R2. I will be updating it faster than RAW, the blog, as well. You'll see videos that are already up on R2 effectively being announced only on RAW (the blog). But that's the way it has been - the videos I link to on RAW are already on YouTube, and Facebook, and other sites.

You might ask, "Isn't video-on-demand (VOD) the future? Why go back to the old school TV model?" Please read the first paragraph again. :D  But seriously, rTV is the best of both worlds. You just sit back and watch. You change channels if you want. No commercials. Almost. You don't like the current show? Then, skip to the next on the list (works on most channels). It's like VOD, but it's also like TV. I wanted to call it another word (TV-on-Web? TOW?), but you know what, I just call it rTV.

Hey, while I set this up so that it can be useful to me, my idea is it can be useful to a lot of other people who, like me, want that TV experience without a TV, and only a computer with web video access. So if you have any suggested channels for rTV, or if you need professional help on how to set-up your own "Virtual TV Set" similar to rTV, send me an email at tv@ronjie.com.

Here's to the cable cutters!

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