tv-kaista

How about getting endless TV over the Internet without the trouble of ever tagging which TV programs you want to record?

Image: Tvinno logo from the Tvinno website.

Now it's possible through a cool new service called Tvinno at www.tvinno.com

Tvinno currently offers these channels:

Germany: RTL, RTL2, SuperRTL, VOX, n-tv, Sat1, ProSieben, Kabel1, N24, 9Live, ZDF, 3Sat, and Kika

Italy: Rai1, Rai2, Rai3

Sweden: SVT1, SVT2, TV3, TV4, Barnkanalen/Kunskapskanalen

Finland: YLE1, YLE2 YLE-fst, YLE Teema, MTV3, Nelonen, JIM, SubTV, Urheilukanava, The Voice

In Finland the service is better known as www.tvkaista.fi - Finnish channels are in that separate service, and the rest (German, Italian and Swedish) can be found from www.tvinno.com

If you click this link here, and register before the 14th of February 2009 you will get a free trial account to try it out.

The service is provided by the same people who have been building up TVKaista for the finnish market. Now they are expanding to the TV of other countries.

Tvinno works by recording every program from every channel. Then it saves everything for a couple of weeks in various formats (the highest resolution being a 8Mbps stream). You can search for programs and save them for later viewing. You can even download specific program files and save them indefinitely on your own hard disk.

I have been using the Finnish version of Tvinno for quite some time now and it has changed the way I watch TV. I no longer worry about recording anything; the service does that for me. And primarily watch all of my TV only from this service.

It comes in very handy in situations where somebody says "did you see that cool interview on channel X a few days ago?" and often enough I didn't, but no worries, I can just login to the service, search and find the clip in an instant and watch it, save it, download it or what ever.

I have also been using the service to save my own TV interviews for later use and for stuff like placing them on Facebook etc.

This is also an excellent service for any expat who wants to get the TV of his/her home country over the Internet. I am under the impression that for example Jyri Engeström of www.Jaiku.com is an enthusiastic user and is using this service to get his Finnish TV in San Francisco.

As far as I know this service is entirely legal in all the above mentioned countries - in essence it is about hiring somebody (in this case a company) to do your TV recording for you. For all practical purposes its the same thing as hiring a person to sit on your couch and manually operate the remote to record every channel. This just does it automatically. Its a public broadcast, its your TV, and you can record it if you want to.

The Tvinno service is still quite raw and almost unskinned as far as fancy graphical UIs go. Despite of that it does work. Some information pages in there might still contain bits of finnish, but for other than that Tvinno seems entirely usable.

What do you think; does something like this have a chance of changing the way people watch broadcast TV?