tVadio: Internet Television on Demand — A review.

@rev@
A few days ago, I ran across a (currently) free service, named tVadio.

What it is, essentially, is a form of On Demand videos, ranging from international television shows, to sports clips, to viral videos. I spent a couple of days just toying around with the application, to see how it handles.

The application takes a bit of time to load on my system:
OS: Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 4 (5.0 - 2195), Installed on: Sunday, September 24 2006
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred) 1.99 GHz with 64 KB of L1 Cache, 256 KB of L2 Cache.
RAM Usage: 505/1024MB (49.32%), Swap File: 545/2463MB.
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X on Monitor: Plug and Play | Resolution: 1280×960x32bpp 70Hz
Sound Card: Vinyl AC’97 Audio (WAVE)

When it loads, you’re greeted by the interface:

It’s fairly simple to navigate, though the number of channels available in tVadio at this time is fairly limited. Give them time.

Now, the application, while it’s easy to use… is actually a little “too easy”.
As a power user or administrator, I would love to be able to turn off the white and red title bar that stands out against the blue of a standard Windows install. It’s actually a bit irritating. Also, when watching a video, I don’t like being shut out of the media player’s options menu (accessed with a right-click on a video in normal cases), as sometimes, I’d like to kick a video up to 200% of its size, for when I want to watch videos, and chat at the same time. The smaller size is fine when I have too much on screen, but I just want to access WMP’s menu to kick it up a size, without having to go full size.

Part of me wonders if tVadio would even work if I hadn’t installed Windows Media Player 9 recently.

I do have to give them some credit, though: They remembered to give a button to allow for Always on Top, for the video window.

I find myself generally watching Sumo TV, which is a viral video channel. The repeat ratio is fairly low, though I *am* getting sick of “Stealth Disco”. However, the fact that I get these viral videos without having to peruse “j00t00b”, and dig through masses of Naruto / other anime uploads is pretty nice.

I think, honestly, that my feelings on tVadio are… mixed. I like, and yet, I hate the simplicity.