So you’re out on the road for business, and one of your evenings isn’t filled with dinner with clients or co-workers. You can’t really justify a taxi ride into the city for some adventure or, even worse, you’re in a town with absolutely no adventure whatsoever. But the good news is, you do have your trusty notebook computer and the hotel has high-speed Internet access. Guess what that means? It means you now have access to virtually limitless sources of news, sports, and entertainment! So say goodbye to boredom and hello to the exciting and wonderful world of streaming content. There are a few prerequisites for accessing streaming media across the ‘Net. The most important of these is a media player. The good news: Almost every Windows-based PC comes equipped with the free Windows Media Player, which is capable of playing MPEG, AVI, and WMV formats for video, as well as almost every audio format available. There might be a cause for other media players, however. Most notable of these is Apple’s QuickTime media player, freely available from quicktime .apple.com. Some other sites might require RealMedia’s Real Player, which you can get from www.real.com free of charge. Real also has a paid offering called SuperPass, which we’ll discuss in detail later in this article.Recently, CNN.com bucked the norm and made all of its video content available for free. Not only does it carry video feeds for each major story for the day, it also has a feed that is updated hourly with the most current updates on news items. To access the feeds at CNN.com, all you need to do is click any video link next to a news story. This will bring up the feed player, providing easy access to every stream available at the current moment via the table of contents on the right. You can view available feeds by relevance to the current video you are watching or by the top-viewed video streams for the day by clicking Top Video. If you’d like to see a simple list of all available video, along with associated popularity ranks, runtime length, and the time it was updated,you can just click Browse in the video tab and see everything available to you at once. CNN.com’s move to free video prompted all the other major news organizations to follow suit, so you can also catch free video throughout the day from FoxNews.com, MSNBC.com, ABC News (abcnews.go.com), and CBSNews.com. Even The Weather Channel (www.weather.com) has begun offering streaming video of its top weather stories updated every few hours from its site, absolutely free of charge. For a less bandwidth-intensive option, National Public Radio (www .npr.org) provides a 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week live radio stream from its Web site for free. Even if you don’t have a high-speed Internet connection, NPR’s radio stream comes across loud and clear. There is a paid offering from Real Network called Real SuperPass which offers access to premium content feeds, usually updated more often than the free content on most sites. A few examples of such feeds are live broadcasts of “Good Morning America” on ABC News and live streaming news from the BBC, as well as premium content from any of the 55 video clients it services. This feature costs $12.99 a month, but you can preview it free for 14 days.ESPN (espn.go.com) is essentially your one-stop sports Web site. It has video, audio, and updates of every game in every sport, live video archives of the highlights of yesterday’s games and biggest sports news stories, games, and even it’s own radio station. ESPNRadio.com is a 24/7 sports-only radio station that streams in real time. Whether you’re looking for scores and updates or a detailed, play-by-play analysis of yesterday’s playoff games, ESPNRadio.com delivers it clearly and doesn’t require high speed to access.NHL; refer to the site for details. Fox Sports has a similar system in its Fox Sports Mobile application, a free download from msn.fox sports.com. Once running, you get live updates via direct feed into the application. You can also access video clips of game highlights both during the game and once it’s over.There are two Web sites of note in the streaming video arena that carry some highly entertaining content on the Internet: Ifilm.com and Atomfilms.com. Both of these sites carry video clips and short films; however, each has its own specialization. Ifilm tends to carry more “viral video” content, high profile videos of commercials, clips, cartoons, and other media that have created a buzz, while Atom Films leans more toward interactive content and preview clips. After Atom Films acquired Shockwave.com, it inherited a ton of interactive video games playable from your Web browser, giving you hours upon hours of boredom elimination. And if you’re looking for independently created shows and serialized screenplays to while away the ticking of the clock, Ifilm’s independent creators are just what you’re looking for. If you’re looking to go down a truly independent track, you could check out the user-streamed broadcasts on Winamp TV. You can download the free Winamp media player atLooking to catch up on previews of the latest movies? Apple features a movie trailer Web site (apple.com/trailers) which catalogues trailers from both upcoming releases and movies that have already been released. The collection of clips available from Apple is nothing short of vast, so even though a movie has already been released, you can determine if you want to spend your hard-earned money on it or not by heading here and watching the trailer.
If music is your first choice for entertainment, there’s a massive repository of streaming music videos available through Yahoo! LAUNCHcast (launch .yahoo.com). Just about every genre of music is represented here, from country-and-western to hip-hop and pop to heavy metal. You can search through music video archives and find the videos you used to watch in your youth (usually behind your parents’ backs), even from artists you’d never imagine would be archived. Relive the glory days of U2 performing at Red Rocks, screeching hair metal, and plaid-filled grunge right from your Web browser. If visual stimulation isn’t really your preference, LAUNC Hcast offers audio streams of all the songs you remember, plus the new material of the day.
