Spb Online adding more Internet streaming TV

Internet streaming television is slowly building up steam. A large portion of the 2008 Olympics was streamed live online and several news stations are streaming online at the moment. However, those streams are useless if you have no way of viewing them. The obvious choice is on a desktop or laptop computer, but there’s also an option for watching the streams on your Windows Mobile device. Spb Online launched their TV streaming service in September 2008, and are now adding more to the service.

The new channels are nice, but a bit disappointing for those that can only speak English.

The new channels include Deutsche Welle (Germany), Channel One Russia, CCTV (China) and MAD TV (Greece). There’s no list of what stations are available, though from the Spb Online site I can see that there’s a CNNi channel and a MTV Dance channel, both of which should be accessible to English-speakers. If the line-up is anything like Livestation’s, then there should be at least a small amount of English content that can be found easily.

I love the idea of live Internet streaming alongside standard television broadcast. Though we can watch a large amount of TV content online after the fact, it would be nice if more American stations offered streaming services. Ideally these would be free, but I would imagine someone would pay for them. It’s just a little depressing that the only American companies that do stream are CNN and MTV.

Read [Spb]