Quick Online Tips

5 Free Services to Replace Your Cable TV

Posted: 01 Sep 2008 10:36 AM CDT

Guest article by Herbert Lui from CutEdge
With TiVo, PVR’s and TV tuners, we can see that computers and TV’s are coming together. Unfortunately, these three solutions all cost one important thing: mullah. Whether you’re rolling in it or strapped for it, I’m sure that we can all agree that cash is important: and as much as it pains us, there are times when we have to sacrifice our cash for services such as the gym, magazines, and…yes, cable TV.

Watch Free Internet TV Online

Until lately, I could have considered canceling subscribing to the gym or magazines — but not to cable TV. I don’t know why — perhaps I’m addicted, or perhaps it’s just the TV vibe. I found this unsettling, so I set out on a journey to the land of Internet TV to find free. I return with a list of five for everyone to enjoy — who knows, you might just cut the cable.

1. Joost
Perhaps the most famous of the five, Joost is already pretty popular amongst mainstream crowds. However, I’d still consider it pretty underrated — depending on your region, they’ve got tons of material available for free that your service provider would charge for. However, because Joost streams video, quality might be compromised for waiting time. I’ve given Joost a test run myself, and I’ve found each of its updates to be more and more impressive. If you’ve yet to try it, give it a shot!

2. AnyTV
Now usually I don’t endorse software that I haven’t personally tried, but I felt compelled to mention this one that I found in PC World - I felt that if it was good enough for them, it’d be good enough for the folks over at QuickOnlineTips.

3. Hulu
Hulu is definitely what I’d consider one of the neatest things since sliced bread. I once went on a trip to the U.S. recently, and had the opportunity to try it out: if I hadn’t been careful, I might’ve stayed all day at the hotel just to watch the shows on it! Quality was acceptable, load times were quick, and — best of all, they had The Simpsons. Unfortunately, Hulu’s still only exclusive to residents of the United States. As a Canadian, I feel totally deprived.

4. Fancast
If Hulu had acceptable quality videos, Fancast’s quality is definitely high-def. Although Hulu is the pioneer and did come first, Fancast is a close number-one contender: the video that I had started actually fit very gracefully onto my 1280×800px monitor by default! However, like Hulu, Fancast is also only available in the United States: which kind of bites for the rest of the world. I’ll throw in two words that I hope don’t get censored: proxy servers.

5. Miro
Miro is the crown jewel of our five: we definitely saved the best for last. Miro is available to the entire world, and actually, has already been mentioned a couple of times on QuickOnlineTips. I felt the need to bring it back up to do it some justice: you haven’t actually experienced Internet TV until you’ve tried Miro. Quality is excellent, GUI is reminiscent of a PVR, and download speeds are acceptable. I won’t rant anymore about Miro, since this should be a quick online tip, but if you’re curious about it, hop over to my post at CutEdge.

There you have it folks — although there are a few more services out there that offer Internet TV, I felt that these five were the ones most worth mentioning. Who knows, if I wandered a bit further into Internet TV territory, I might be able to come back with a few more jewels to share with everyone!

This guest article was written by Herbert Lui from CutEdge where he blogs about tech advice, resources, and reviews for the consumer, that will help you buy smarter, think smarter, and know more about products. Got a tip to share, you can also write a guest article on QOT.

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500,000 Pageviews!

Posted: 01 Sep 2008 09:19 AM CDT

After a long journey of several years, QOT traffic finally managed to cross 500,000 pageviews this month; to make that sound grander, that is half a million pageviews!

500000 pageviews

Here are the sitemeter statistics. Looking back at the site traffic a year back in August 2007, we had 170,000 visitors and 260,000 pageviews. This August 2008, exactly a year later, we got 340,000 visitors and over 520,000 pageviews - that is a 100% growth rate in a year.

Some events that made this difference are the BBC feature, Indian Express feature, rare 9rules branding, the Quickpress wordpress theme launch, our new photoblog, crossing 15000 RSS reader landmark, and switch to full text feeds. We got the honor of featuring in some lists like the Top 25 blogs about blogging and Top 20 Wildly Sticky, Successful and Outstanding Blogs on Blogging, and top Uber blogs.

Considering social media, there is a regular stream of Stumbleupon users visiting the site, well above any other competitor. Google Pagerank has been on a roll, falling from PR6 to PR3, then zooming back to PR6, and falling again to PR5 in the last update, but the traffic kept coming.

Some tools like the powerful All-in-One SEO pack wordpress plugin helped optimize the site for Wordpress SEO, Google sitemaps plugin sent search engines indexing deep inside the site, and WP-Super cache keeps the site up as the wonderful Dreamhost hosting keeps the site uptime in all kinds of traffic.

And of course its all thanks to the amazing QOT readers, commentors, guest bloggers, critics and subscribers who keep coming back to find useful content. 500,000 pageviews was a tough milestone to pass, but with all the QOT readers by the side, we were finally able to cross it… Thanks.

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