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With broadband penetration on the rise and faster connection speeds, Internet Television is slowly becoming a reality for many users. There are numerous services out there that provide streaming media and video on demand. Heck, Malaysia even has its own service although I shudder everytime I remember the fugly layout.

TVadio (Web TV) is one such service that’s trying to streamline and enhance your internet television viewing pleasure.

The Website
A brief reading of their website gave me a headache. The pages and categorisation were a mess and hard to filter. There was too much text to sieve through with very little space and absolutely zero images to break the monotony. It would have been better to give a small screen capture of each channel and a brief description instead of drowning the users with text. Recognisable channel logos are probably the best. The fact that the majority of the channel links lead to some other cluttered websites DOES NOT HELP!

Getting It To Work
The people behind TVadio have released a beta version of their player for testing and feedback. Personally speaking, I feel that there are too many bugs in the current state of the product for it to qualify as a beta. They should instead release it for a limited alpha test first. But I’m not them.

Getting it to work was a chore all of itself. Here’s what I had to do to get it going:

1. Install .NET framework version 1.1.4322 (22+MB and a bloody inconvenience!)
2. Download and install the TVadio client (2.2MB)
3. Optionally install/update the following video clients:
   • Windows Media Player
   • Real Player
   • AOL Media Player
4. Run the client
5. Select a channel to see the sypnosis
6. Click play to watch

Notice the multiple components and downloads that were required. As an end user, I find it annoying that I have to go through this kagillion step process just to see something that can’t even be called half a product. If I weren’t a programmer myself, I wouldn’t know what the heck a .NET framework was much less how to download and install it.

Microsoft has done a swell job of confusing everyone by having a million different versions of the framework on the website that pops up. Mind you that there is significant difference between version 1 and version 2, and they are NOT blardy compatible! Make sure you’re installing version 1.1. Otherwise you’re just going to waste 30 minutes of your life downloading the wrong piece of junk.

tVadio Player 0.5 Beta

The idea behind tVadio is to centralised Internet Channels to one easily accessible console. I think that’s a simple idea that will work. However, they way they’ve gone about it is downright ugly.

They’ve basically cobbled together a collection of plugins into their player without doing any actual work themselves! They are probably using the IE activeX component for organising the channels, and they’ve placed wrappers around the Media Player, Real Player and AOL Media Player activeX plugins to give them a ‘tVadio look and feel’. In other words, the client isn’t really a player at all but simply a portal for easy accesibility. Talk about taking shortcuts.

The worse part about it all is that NOTHING works! The first time I launched it, nothing appears. Subsequently whenever I try to launch a channel, the player crashes. Everytime the Media Player plugin launches, it crashes. Each time I click something, the program crashes. It even crashes when I try to close the program!

I have Real Player installed (as proven by the initial check when tVadio first installs). However, whenever I try to view a channel that requires this particular player, the program keeps insisting that I don’t have it installed and tells me to do so. And when I DO try to install it, you guessed it, the program crashes. Something’s definitely wrong here.

Last but definitely not least, the client is freaking FAT. It has a footprint that’s larger than Firefox! And it isn’t even doing anything fancy or spectacular. Talk about an inefficient behemoth.

Something Nice
I’m trying really hard to find something nice to say about TVadio but nothing’s turning up. I guess to their credit, they got the system to continually crash consistently. That REALLY IS quite a feat.

In Conclussion
It took me nearly two hours to install everything. If I weren’t the curious sort, I would have given up the moment the silly .NET framework requirement popped up. And when I finally did get everything installed, the damn shitty piece of program crashes on me at every bloody click of every freaking button and every (I’m running out of curses) launch of every stupid plugin. What the FISH? After all the grief, I didn’t get to view a single channel! Long story short, don’t bother trying out the beta.

The tagline on their website reads: tVadio Player Download - The Easiest Way to Watch Online TV. That’s probably the worst overstatement I’ve come across this year. They are really letting their egos get ahead of themselves.

Word of advice to the people at TVadio. Fix your product before trying to get people to test it. You’re not Microsoft. The approach of pushing a quarter baked product to customers to get feedback then making hotfixes and patches is not going to work. First impressions for a new player is important. If your product sucks the first time, no one’s going to want to come back for a seconds.