The PhoneBoy Blog

Fancast: Watching TV In The Cloud

06 Sep 2008

I can’t remember where exactly I heard of Fancast. Maybe it was those stupid emails Comcast send out to customers every month. Why? Because Fancast is a Comcast joint.

So what is it? It’s yet another one of these aggregate portals where you can video content from CBS, FOX, NBC, Comedy Central, etc. Over 38,000 videos you can watch for free–with ads, of course. The ads, unfortunately, got a bit repetitive. I saw the same ads more than once–in the same show!

Most of the videos on there play directly on the Fancast site. Shows on ABC, however, are directed to the appropriate page on the ABC site.

I liked how well it “found” stuff, but I found the player to crash Firefox 3.0 on my Mac on several occasions–particularly on the transition between ads and content. There is no marker on the player where the commercial breaks are, making it difficult to resume when the browser restarts.

Assuming the Flash player doesn’t crash your browser, if you leave the window open for an extended period of time and you’ve paused whatever it is you were watching, it recovers far better than Hulu, which frequently doesn’t under the same circumstances.

My question, though, is whether or not these programs I view on Fancast count against my250GB cap.