Online TV has been a ‘must-have application, coming real soon now' for some years, so it's easy to be tempted by an application offering over 1,000 TV channels for just £15. PCShowBuzz is indeed an Internet TV player which does its job well enough, but there's still a fairly major problem with the overall package... the channel content.

PCShowBuzz is a quarter-screen-sized player with a Channel Explorer panel down the left-hand side. It all seems pretty promising at this stage, as you can group channels by country or genre and build up your own set of favourites or trace back through your browsing history. As with any Internet TV application, you'll need a reasonable broadband speed - we suggest 1Gbps or above - to get uninterrupted playback.

The main panel shows the channel currently being played, a list of available channels under the category you've chosen, a schedule for the selected channel, a search engine for hunting down subject matter or an options panel for simple configuration. It's when you pick a particular country or genre and view what's available that the player's potential takes a dive.

Using the UK channels as an example, this isn't an easy way to get at BBC, ITV or the other major commercial stations. There is some BBC content in the list, such as BBC Channel Islands, BBC Liquid News and BBC Parliament, but these are hardly mainstream and there's no indication - particularly important for the news channels - of whether they're current. Several of the BBC channels require a copy of Real Player installed on your PC to run and PCShowBuzz automatically closes when Real Player takes over.

Quite a few of the channels are not continuous feeds, either, but simply a download of a particular program. So, for example, the STV (North) - for Scottish TV - channel is a brief news bulletin lasting around five minutes, and several other channels come back as ‘currently unavailable' again and again.

As well as factual programming, mainly news channels, there are a lot of shopping channels, poker and sport. There's very little drama, and most of that goes back a long way. Music channels vary from the reasonably well-known, such as TMS and Classic FM, to the more obscure - certainly in the UK - such as Kulak's Woodshed (singer songwriters) and Worm TV (German Electronic).

There are plenty of trailers available and quite a few Flash movies, though most of these are fairly puerile. None of this is directly PCShowBuzz's problem, of course. It's making available what's there on the Internet, but its ‘1,000 channels' headline highlights the quantity, not the quality.

Verdict
PCShowBuzz organises and plays back a lot of channels competently enough. At the moment, though, there may not be enough things worth watching. In the words of the Springsteen song; 57 channels and nothing on.

Company: Avanquest

Contact: 0800 289041

Tags: bbc television classic fm television channel internet television bbc world service arts william hague