Each month 3click.TV will be giving away an iPhone to one lucky new subscriber. We will announce the lucky winner chosen at random on the last day of each month. 3click.TV is the only ad free streaming TV service that supports both the iPhone nad Window Mobile equipped smart phones.
Good luck, and keep watching-
3click.TV
Is it the 3click show index - or a massive TiVo?
Watching TV online has long been a combination of 50% luck and 90% pain and disappointment so it was only a matter of time before some bright spark realized the popularity for watching quality TV from the web was unexploited… ABC’s Lost, for example, was downloaded more than 2.8 million times in 2008.
Corporate-backed “mega sites” continue slowly to make the transition to TV on the web but nearly as many people use bit torrents or downloads.
Streaming is taking over in a big way although even now, only a handful of websites offer TV shows and these are limited to a few episodes of popular programming full of annoying ads. There are other catches too: Hulu does offer good streams but then limits the viewers to residents of the United States only… go ask your local Canadian about this. Finally, one internet startup set out to change the game.
3click.TV is this new kid on the block and it brings a true TiVo type experience to your desktop, your iPhone, and your Windows Mobile SmartPhone. That’s right, no ads, available everywhere, and offering unbeatable complete season show collections.
“This is the service that people expect from internet television.”
This gem stands out as the #1 streaming television site of 2009. The good folks at 3click.TV have made it easier than ever to enjoy all your favorite premium television shows. The in-browser player works flawlessly and their detailed show index catalogs more than 12,000 episodes spread over nearly 200 shows - and growing daily - with descriptions provided for each episode. The single most important feature however has to be the 3click.TV iPhone Edition, a high resolution streaming service direct to your iPhone, swiftly making iTunes at $1.99 per downloaded episode seem hardly feasible…
The downside of 3click.tv’s iPhone service is that if you are in an area with poor 3G service or a less than pristine wifi connection, you may experience some or a lot of buffering. We tried it in a number of environments ranging from coffee shops, airports, hotels, and home or office connections with a variety of results. The solution is to pause play to load an episode (similar to YouTube) for hiccup-free viewing.
3click.TV plans to stay ahead of the pack by now offering complete seasons of all featured shows. Crystal clear quality audio and video makes viewing a pleasure and no geographical limitations on this service breaks out the smiles across the globe. Streaming all this great content to SmartPhones equipped with Windows Mobile OS and using the new Skyfire Mobile browser are also another noteworthy. Future developments include a robust sports package and a set-top box enabling TV junkies anywhere to plug into the web and watch, which will bring about the inevitable death of conventional cable/satellite TV.
So the next time we want to indulge in a season of 24 or Dexter or take in all 20 seasons of The Simpsons, we go to this one-stop comprehensive library. What’s even better is that your episodes actually play on the first click. And that goes for you Canadians too!
BY: Ed Hardy, Brighthand.com Editor
PUBLISHED: 1/28/2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote an editorial commenting on how horrible browsing the Web is on most mobile devices. Amazingly, there’s already a solution for this problem, at least for some users. It’s called Skyfire, and it is far and away the best web browser for Windows Mobile I’ve ever seen.
This application offers just about all the features you need to access “Web 2.0″ sites, like dynamic Flash, advanced Ajax, and Java. It’s good enough that your main limitation in browsing is going to be the size and resolution of your smartphone’s screen, and Skyfire is even able to compensate for that.
I was able to spend some time with an early beta, and I found I genuinely enjoyed putting this application through its paces.
Pushing the Limits
Internet Explorer Mobile is a decent web browser. Limited, but decent. So if Skyfire is going to be worth our time, it’s going to have to be able to do things the default Windows Mobile browser can’t. That’s why as soon as I loaded it on an AT&T Tilt I went straight to YouTube.
Skyfire acts generally like the iPhone browser. When you open a site, what you see is it shrunk down to fit on your smartphone’s display. You can then tap on the screen to zoom in on sections of the page.
When I went to YouTube, what I saw was the full site, not a stripped down version. I selected a video and the page opened, and the video immediately began to play, with full motion and sound.
And all this happened really, really quickly. I went to New York Times site and the home page loaded in less than 4 seconds.
But I wanted to keep testing Skyfire, so I next went to Google Maps and looked up my house. Again, what I saw was virtually identical to what appears when I look at this site on my desktop computer.
Naturally, I tried out Brighthand too, just as successfully.
Reading Articles
As I said earlier, when you open a web page in Skyfire you see it shrunken down to fit on your smartphone’s screen. Because the smartphone I tested this application on has a QVGA screen — as most Windows Mobile devices do — I could read the headlines of articles on news sites, but not the text.
That’s why you need to expand sections of the page to make them readable. When you do this, though, in many cases news articles become wider than what’s being displayed. Fortunately, you aren’t forced to pan-and-scan to be able to read these.
This browser offers a feature called SmartFit, which reformats the text on a page so that it’s as wide as your smartphone’s screen when you’re zoomed in on a section of a page.
The Skyfire people warned me that this is one of the features that still needs considerable effort before it’s fool-proof, but it worked fine when I tested it.
The Basics
Skyfire offers all kinds of advanced features, but the basic ones haven’t been forgotten. It has a full-screen mode, for example, and you can store cookies and bookmarks. It’s even possible to bookmark a specific location on a web page.
It also works on all the versions of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which includes devices with a touchscreen and those without. When Skyfire is being used without a stylus, you control an on-screen pointer with the D-pad.
Naturally, it also offers both landscape and portrait modes. But before anyone asks, I haven’t had a chance to test this application on a VGA screen.
An Important Note
One of the reasons this browser is so fast and full-featured is it’s server based. When you’re opening a web page with your smartphone, it’s actually being opened on a Skyfire server, which then sends an image of the page to your device.
The advantages of this are numerous, but there’s a drawback, too: privacy. Because your web browsing will be done through a remote server, it’s possible for Skyfire to keep track of all the sites you visit and all the data you enter, including passwords, credit card numbers, etc.
I spoke with Skyfire CEO Nitin Bhandari about this, and he assured me that his company takes its customer’s privacy seriously. Still, this is something you should keep in mind.
It’s a Beta
As impressed as I am with Skyfire, I’m not blind to its flaws. However, the vast majority of these I chalk up it currently being a beta.
For example, I watched a long clip on YouTube, and after a few minutes the audio and video were slightly out of sync. The application also crashed on me once while I was activating SmartFit. But these are the sort of things I consider “teething pains”, and will likely be cleared up before the full version is available.
There’s also currently an important feature missing, but it’s high on the developer’s To-Do List: multi-line text entry. Currently, you can type in a single line of text, like a few words you want Google to search for. You can’t, however, put a post in the Brighthand forums. You can’t even piece it together line-by-line. Attempting to enter text into a multi-line text field gets you a pop-up windows saying this feature is coming soon.
Video Overview
I’ve put together a short video demonstrating Skyfire in action. You can see it below.
In it, I attempt to show off the high points of this new application, including its speed and the ability to play Flash video.
The demo also includes a bit on the SmartFit feature.
Coming Soon
Skyfire has just announced a private beta for Windows Mobile phones in the U.S.
The company promises it will introduce a version for Symbian smartphones in the coming months, and other platforms and countries are on the product roadmap. It’s keeping mum about what these are, though.
You can sign-up for the private beta by visiting skyfire.com. There is no charge.
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