ABC.com Launches Streaming HD Player

ABC's Web site has finally gone live with that streaming HD player we first heard about back in May. So, how does it look? It ain't cable or satellite HD quality, but considering it's free (and still in beta), not bad at all. Of course, depending on your PC and the speed of your Net connection, your mileage will most certainly vary.

For now, the beta test of the ABC's streaming player is pretty limited; you can only choose from an episode each of "Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty" and "Lost" (at least it's the season finale of "Lost," giving you ample opportunity to pick over that puzzler of an episode). The player itself streams video at 720p (the same resolution as broadcast ABC HD) at 24 frames per second, and you get a total of three sizes: 1280 by 720 pixels, a full-screen mode, or the normal SD version. The episodes are free, but you'll have to deal with "limited" commercial interruption from the likes of Toyota and Sears (the ads are actually 30-second interactive Web ads, one each per commercial break).

I watched the "Lost" episode (I couldn't bring myself to watch "Desperate Housewives" or "Ugly Betty"), and my experienced was decidedly mixed. The video looked about as bad as YouTube for the first 15 seconds or so, but the picture sharpened right up once the player got a good lock on the data stream. (You'll need at least a 2MB data connection to get a decent picture, or else the player will down-scale the video to compensate). Even with the big data pipe here at my office, backgrounds looked fuzzy and blocky, and the picture juttered a bit on my Santa Rosa-powered MacBook Pro, so don't expect Discovery HD Theater-like video even under the best of conditions. Still, once everything was working smoothly, faces and foreground objects had that razor-sharp HD look—pretty cool for over-the-Web video streaming.

Give it a try, but  keep in mind that you'll need at least a cable data connection and a blazing system for a good HD picture; also, this is day one of the beta, so I'm guessing that ABC.com's servers are getting hit pretty hard right about now.

Related:
ABC.com Set to Stream Shows in HD [Yahoo! Tech]