Browsing Movie Trailers.

Today, Microsoft released a beta of a project called Internet TV. Essentially, Internet TV is Microsoft’s answer to Joost, tied into Windows Media Center. Currently, the service pulls content only from MSN Video. Quality is claimed to be suitable for TV viewing.

Microsoft has stated that there are 100 hours of content currently available. The service is available for free with advertising shown periodically from the YuMe advertising platform. Available content includes full TV episodes of Arrested Development, full-length music concerts, movie trailers, news clips, and sports clips.

The beta is available to users of Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate (the two versions of Vista that ship with Media Center by default,) and is automatically downloaded and added to the Media Center interface.

En mi opinion: Having tested this for a bit, it does work fairly well. Unfortunately, the video quality is below average and is obviously being scaled up from YouTube-like quality settings. The ads aren’t that annoying, I haven’t had them interrupt any video, they were just inserted between videos. I haven’t tried watching a full TV episode, however, to see how that’s handled. Video plays smoothly, no stopping to buffer or anything of that nature. Certainly worth a look if you’ve got the means.