AOL to Launch Free Internet TV?

By admin November 15th, 2005

Hm…I thought free Internet TV already existed but obviously, I was wrong. AOL has plans to launch free Internet TV called In2TV next year. It’ll have six channels, you know, animation, drama, comedy, action etc. and will offer 3400 hours of programming for its first year (that’s not bad considering an iPod Video episode costs what, $1.99? That’s $6800 worth non-ipod formatted stuff).

The sad thing though, is that they’re not sure if they’ll be doing AOL users only or US users only. Bad, bad news for us in different countries — I too wish I could get a few more shows here (Apprentice Season 4? Please?). I think this is a good move, but then again the question of community vs. world-dominating company is bought up in this. BitTorrent — a community "powered-by" network or In2TV — AOL powered network. I personally think this will suck (have this weird "AOL" feeling) but who knows, I may as well be wrong.

http://marshallk.com Marshall Kirkpatrick

I think you’re being unfair here. AOL is really moving towards open content to drive ad revenue. EG their acquisition of Weblogs Inc. They are moving out of the walled garden aproach and there’s little reason to believe they will move back in that direction in this effort.
http://www.rev2.org Sid Yadav

I do agree you Marshall, but then again, would you trust a corporate rather than a community? A corporate is all about making money, and a community is all about the real deal (with money left out). This is exactly the case and the difference between open source and Microsoft. It’s like Microsoft getting into open source without the people — might not work.

If AOL manages to find the balance, and their acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. was certainly a sign of this, then great, whatever AOL does next I’ll be optimistic about, but until then it’s just a matter of being a spectator.

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