Weekend Fun: Watch Live TV on Multiple Platforms with Livestation
Over the past few weeks we have been covering different applications that allow you watch television shows on your computer. The latest entry in our series is Livestation, which has improved their service recently and has more live television than anything we have covered so far.
The fact that it is supported on multiple platforms is also a huge plus, so users of Windows, Mac, and Linux can all share in the experience.
Installing Livestation on Windows
Installation is quick and easy, just run through the wizard, there are no specific settings to worry about.
Using Livestation
After a successful install Livestation will launch and prompt you to create an account.
After your account is created you can start watching live programming. Another screen also launched next to the main application that ran me though a tutorial. You can pull this tutorial up at any time later from the help menu.
The Livestation application is very easy to use and navigate. There is a cool channel carousel that provides a nice flowing selection menu. Visit the Livestation website to add additional channels to your player.
There is a preview screen in the middle of the carousel and you can toggle between that and a large screen by hitting the space bar. If you double click the display it will go to full screen.
You can also set Desktop Alerts to notify you of events. There are three types of alerts which are breaking news, Livestation updates, and new channels. How long the alert displays and its transparency is adjustable.
I have found Livestation to be great for the things I want to watch live which is news and sports. They have over 1300 live channels to choose from in varying languages. You are not going to find episodes of sitcoms on Livestation. For those programs you want to use a video aggregate site or use other TV programs we have covered.
I tried installing this on Linux Thursday afternoon in hopes of catching The Office that night. I was pretty disappointed with the quality of the channels. There seem to be a handful of "sponsored" channels which were decent. However, the majority of channels are "user submitted" and very unreliable.
The user interface for the desktop client was also pretty hard to use. I know this is an early release, so I'll check back to see if things get any better down the road.
This is pretty awesome for the fact that I am a news fiend
One word, ESTIMALE!
The new interface is much better than the previous version. There are handful channles that we can watch, user submitted channles that I tried to watch don't work often. BBC, NASA channles that I watched work well, only this is my broaband speed isn't good enough. This is a cool program.
Does this work outside USA? usually services like this are location restricted.