TMN Online now available to Bell TV subs

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MCIBUS

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Will this work with Wireless conection? If your traveling, Lets say to Montreal or Toronto by Via Rail or Greyhound and you have your laptop with you can this work via Cell or what ever the proces is when traveling being conected too the internet?

If possible this will be great for that option.

Don't know that much about computers so don't know if his is possible or not? :confused:
 
If you had a wireless connection then i would definatly assume yes. Or if wifi was offered on those trips then sure. The problem with your cell connection or the mobile internet offered by bell or rogers is that you're so limited on the amount of bandwidth that you would be paying a fortune just to be able to watch a movie using those.
 
Bell TV today announced the launch of TMN Online, which enables Bell TV subscribers with The Movie Network to watch movies and series from any computer with access to high-speed Internet service anywhere in Canada.

Viewers will be able to access approximately 130 hours of content weekly with new content made available each week. For added convenience, subscribers can fast-forward, rewind, play and pause movies and series and review title descriptions.

Bell says the service is the first in North America where authentication and access are linked to the subscriber, rather than to the home Internet connection. This enables customers to stream TMN Online content to their desktop or laptop computer anywhere in Canada, wherever a high-speed connection is available.

bell.ca/tvonline
 
It appears to be working today for me. The movie offering are extremely limited. There is only 1 movie that I would actually watch. The PPV movies are actually better and there are a few movies there that I would watch if they were free... otherwise I would much rather rent it in DVD (better quality, etc.).
 
VIA does have wifi but it is flaky and often too slow to allow for a video stream. But in theory, yes!
 
I tried the service out for about 5 minutes last night. It looks not bad on my computer screen and then I took an older computer of mine and plugged it into my LCD TV. The quality was OK, but not excellent. Alot of jagged edges and the such but it seems to be inconsistant so I think the compression varies depending on the complexity of the image. It was good enough that I will be watching one of their series that looks interesting.

Unfortunately I wanted to watch a full show this afternoon and I'm getting a webbrowser 502 proxy error.

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /tvonline/servlet/CommandServlet.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

So I'm wondering if the servers are overloaded or something. (Edit:Update: the page now says that the "service is temporarily unavailible" so I guess they are having a hard time.)

According to bell the data stream is 900 Kbps which I think I worked out to about 300 megabytes / hour. Check my math though I'm horrible with B and b conversions and get things mixed up. It won't kill your cap... but they do make a point of saying it will count against your usage even if you are a bell internet user.

I think the service has promise. The interface is quick and clean. My hope is they will be offering a higher resolution feed eventually and a bit more movie selection as well. But they do rotate the movies around. Not bad for a first effort IMO, but certainly has room to grow.
 
Quote:
"I don't have TMN so I can't check, but can anyone confirm if this runs over Flash or something else like Windows Media or QuickTime? "

It uses Microsoft Silverlight, and of course DRM. From my brief testing, the video is too jerky to be watchable. I have a stable 6Mb/s Bell connection.

I suspect watching it on a big screen (TV) would be just annoying, as it is poor resolution and highly compressed.
 
This is great news. Astral Media continues to set a high bar for other Canadian broadcasters to match. I see the future and it is online delivery, directly from broadcasters.

:OT: Bell and Rogers are probably shaking in their boots, worried that direct subscriptions to services like TMN will cut into their BDU profits. Oh wait, they will just kill the competition by whining to the CRTC and throttling and/or penalizing customers on their ISP networks. :/OT:
 
Similar to this, BellTV is also now offering through the same service Family Online and Playhouse Disney Online. My daughter has watched a couple TV episodes through this, and it seems good, when it works. I'd say 50% of the time over the last three or four days we've been getting error messages (proxy server problem, cannot authenticate, sometimes it just crashes IE). When it does work, picture quality seems pretty good: I've been expanding it to full screen on my 22" monitor, and aside from a few minor artifacts, its about the same as the SD picture on my 37" HDTV.
 
But wouldn't you really prefer to watch this (or Hulu, etc) on your widescreen TV?

I can't speak for others, but I personally wouldn't want to watch TMN (though I really appreciate Bell's effort) on my 15" laptop when I spent the cash on an HD 9242 and 52" Sharp.

The ability to stream from this service and others straight to your TV, or via an intermediary like a PS3 etc, would really allow this to take off in Canada me thinks.
 
It indeed uses Microsoft Silverlight. DRM is embedded.
It runs great! HD-Quality (Not HD, but near there). I have 7Mbps right now and it's perfect as is! Works on Mac and Windows.

Having it on my 9242 PVR would be absolutely FANTASTIC (since it's got an ethernet port, I can see this being done).

Again, it uses Silverlight and the quality and smoothness of a video is absolutely fantastic. I've already watched about 4-5 movies!
 
I'm sure this will appeal to some computer users who have fast download connections and big bandwidth caps but I don't see this service being of much use to most Bell TV subscribers. Even then, do these people want to watch movies on their computer?

My suspicion is that 99% of their customers want Video on demand at their television, not their computer.
 
Guess you can always hookup a line from the comp to the tv if you have tv out capabilities on your comp. I'll have to check and see if i can feed it through the xbox via media sharing or some way to rig it. But definally nice to be able to finally have access to a quazi VoD type of service.
 
Logging into it now and checking it out it seems to be just the TMN stuff. No HBO content on there. So really, its very limited. Most of the good series that i'd probably use are part of the HBO package. Wonder if that will get added as well as its included with the TMN sub.
 
It works fine via Mac Mini out to my HDTV. Quite good actually. Now if there were a plugin for XBMC so that you could control it with a remote that would be better.

The real downside to this is the proprietary nature of the encoding. This is Flash2 all over again ( but of course it's much better in quality). Why they can't use a standard is beyond me...

I like it, but I hope it fails. They need to follow web standards, move towards html5, use h.264, ...and make it platform independent. It should be able to run on media players, pc's, mac's, Linux, PS3, etc...

philip
 
I get 120GB a month. This web application takes little bandwidth. Can barely see it's usage on my meter.
 
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