Last year's hottest new website was video hosting cache YouTube. Launched in 2005 it rapidly took off and was sold to Google for about a billion quid a year later. Now it is being sued by Viacom for a similar amount due to alledged copyright violations. Whatever comes of it, YouTube will be remebered as the site that sparked a new revolution in video over internet.

This year free online TV sites have been popping up all over the web like dandelines in a spring garden. Typical examples include channelchooser.com, freetube.us.tc, chooseandwatch.com, worldtvpc.com, channelking.com, wwitv.com, streamick.com, beelineTV.com etc. What you get from most of them is an aggregated mixture of streamed video sources including niche web channels, offical iptv, video loops and feed-rips. The picture quality can best be described as mostly low-definition (LDTV) but there are examples of high definition downloads available if you look around.

Higher quality Online-TV service providers are on the way. Joost is currently the most touted because it has already signed content deals with some big media corporations such as Viacom. Bittorent, formerly infamous as a file sharing enabler site are going straight with their IPTv offering. Others such as Zudeo and Babblegum look promising too. The technology being used is peer to peer based, so as you watch a program you are uploading it in packets from other people's PCs and you are also passing it on from yours. This technology is highly scalable because the originator of the content does not have to stream it to every viewer.

The advent of Joost and similar services will be the kickstart that the media-PC business needs to get going. With thousands of channels to choose from and much of it cheap or pay-on-demand, it will compete well with traditional TV broadcasting as soon as the quality is on a par. Broadband bandwidth limits are one factor holding back IPTV. The bit rate is increasing fast with 8Mb/s serivce being standard in many area. That should be sufficient to stream good quality video but most customers find the actual rate achieved is much lower than the theoretcial maximum due to sharing contention and other bottlenecks. This is less of a problem for on-demand video which can be downloaded in advance. The other issue is the monthly download cap that many broadband internet service providers set. You can quickly use up a 10 GByte limit by downloading a few good quality video files, so if you are getting into PC entertainment in a big way make sure that you get an uncapped broadband service. It may be a bit more expensive but it is worth the extra cost.

With 24 Mb/s on the way, the cable and satellite broadcasters must think that internet TV will become viable compettion soon because they are pushing their own internet TV services so as not to be outdone. In the UK, satellite TV giant BSkyB has lauched its own broadband service in conjunction with on-demand TV service "Sky Anytime". cable provider Virgin Media has a similar business plan . It remains to be seen how well these expensive products from the media giants will compete against the new cheap offerings from fresh upstart companies like Joost.

For those who are not ready to spend time configuring their PC for TV viewing there are new electronic gadgets that mediate in various ways between the internet and the TV. One front-runner is the V-Box for the BT-Vision service which provides a good number of channels via the internet "for free" after the connection cost. The catch is that you must subscribe to "BT Total Broadband" which is not free. For less restrictive options try Apple-TV or Netgear's Digtal Entertainment router. Sony are also launching equipment for streaming video directly to their latest Bravia HDTVs.