I’ve been testing this little program for a few weeks now, and I’d wanted to tell you about it for some time now, because it’s just so great.
ADSL TV is a little freeware that enables you to watch TV on your computer. It uses the Freebox as a video server, and interfaces nicely with the VLC player. Free.fr actually started offering this service about a month ago but using it with VLC was not straightforward (you need to load a playlist for instance).
ADSL TV has wrapped a nice UI on top of the service and allows you to easily watch one TV channel, record another at the same time (with a timer), enable you to launch a video compression program after a program is recorded, gives you access to an online TV guide, etc.
I had stopped watching TV more or less in 2004, but with little app on my desktop, I can launch TV anytime on my computer. I really feel that convergence between computers and TV sets is happening. Tivo had initiated this trend a few years ago, quickly followed by DirectTV, then Akimbo, and more recently by Orb systems and Slingmedia (by the way, they have just raised almost $50M – watch my interview of Blake, the CEO, here).
