wwiTV May 26, 2008
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Media Streaming, Organizations , 2commentsA lot of worldwide TV channel aggregator websites coming up these days. When I was writing about the last one (TVChannelsFree), I came across wwiTV.
wwiTV does what other online channel aggregators do: collect the links of online streams for TV channels. Their content ranges from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and for India they offer around 21 channels. Some of the Indian streams are rare finds like Doordarshan, Lok Sabha TV, Zee TV…
I haven’t tried their service long enough to comment on the stream quality. Post a comment if you have.
TVChannelsFree May 25, 2008
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Media Streaming , 1 comment so farTVChannelsFree aggregates live streaming video sources from around the world- it has almost 3,000 TV channels that you can view in your browser. Although there is content from around 80 countries, what interests us are the 14 Indian channels available.
The channels are in real media or windows media format and the stream quality is quite good. I don’t think any of the content is hosted by TVChannelsFree, they merely have pointers to the source. Either way, this is a gray space from a copyright perspective. For the time being, it doesn’t seem like any Indian media company is worried about their content being streamed online without authorization. If you ask me, the wider audience means more recognition and that is good for Indian channels, nevermind legality.
FullHyderabad May 11, 2008
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Local Search, Travel , add a commentFullHyderabad is an online city guide for Hyderabad and Secunderabad. The site has been operational since 2000 but like most of the bottom-up web startups, hasn’t gained a lot of traction (see the compete.com stats below- although I dont trust compete 100%, there is a story that the almost-real numbers tell).
What I like about the site is it’s perseverance. FullHyderabad has stuck it out for more than 8 years with what seems like little outside financial support (they seem to have the usual ad-based business model). The site is fairly well designed and navigation is not hard to understand. Even though I know little about Hyderabad, the site content seems to be significant. There are classifieds, event info, hotel info etc. that seem to be fairly uptodate, although I do think that homepage is a bit overstuffed.
I think local entrepreneurial efforts like FullHyderabad are essential building blocks for web as an knowledge infrastructure. Once the physical web-connectivity starts being ubiquitous, what India will need to attract and retain internet users is content. The data gathered by initiatives like FullHyderabad will collectively fill that gap, and make internet useful for the masses. Hope they survive on their own and resist being consumed by one of the horizontal portals like yahoo/rediff/Indiatimes etc.
Avashya May 1, 2008
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Blogs, Technology , add a commentAvashya is a site tracking news and analysis of web 2.0 happenings in India. Besides web 2.0 tech type content, they veer into bollywood and cricket too (which is a bit puzzling for me to see in a site with a web 2.0 tagline). Regardless, their tech section is somewhat useful since they aggregate posts from well-read sources. Site may not be the most good-looking but is functional and easy to navigate. One of these days I’m going to make a blogroll for eIndia, and stick Avashya in there.