With around 1 in 5 households now connected to broadband a new opportunity for media players has emerged.  High quality, streaming media is now available to users in a way that has traditionally been the domain of television.

Three quite different internet services are profiled below, all providing TV ‘on-demand’, in that you click on a clip to watch it.

• ABC Online – a full broadband portal, with highlights including News coverage, 4Corners and of course ABC Kids.
• RooTV – an aggregation and streaming platform for a wide range of video content from many sources.
• Yahoo! Launch – focused on music and video clips, Yahoo! Launch has a staggering library of free online content

ABC Online

If you’re a news junkie like a few of us here at Internetrix, there’s nothing more frustrating than looking at your watch and realising it is 8 minutes past the hour – no more news until next hour. Well, not anymore, with the ABC news on demand service.

Simply go to the ABC Broadband site, click on ‘News’ and you’ll get the latest bulletin, usually containing half a dozen or more stories. Including full video clips, it is just like watching the TV news.

Of course, the ABC does more than just news – one of the few full and unedited TV programs you’ll find at the ABC website is Media Watch, which can also be accessed from the ABC broadband portal.

To see it for yourself, go to http://abc.net.au/broadband/

RooTV

RooTV is probably the closet thing to an online TV network. Taking news, video and other clips from multiple sources, it is supported by advertising.

RooTV has a particularly international feel to it. You get news stories from across the globe, but with its predominantly North American feel, it is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. As with the ABC (through Rage) and Yahoo! Launch below, music video clips feature as a draw card.

To see it for yourself, go to http://www.rootv.com.au/

Yahoo! Launch

Yahoo! has long positioned itself as a one-stop-shop for almost anything. Want weather? Want finance? Want email? Yahoo! can give you all of this, and more. Recently, however, Yahoo! has added a new, exceptional feature to its content line-up, known as Yahoo! Launch.

Launch is basically a music-oriented library of videos, ring tones and radio stations, with a bit of music news thrown in for good measure. With a powerful search engine, and close to 4000 video clips to choose from, this site is vast considering all of the content is free of charge.

To check out the site for yourself, visit http://au.launch.yahoo.com/ (Australia) or http://launch.yahoo.com/ (global).