Rabbit TV : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

A way to watch TV and movies on your computer almost free. You need a high speed Internet connection and a small Rabbit TV USB (Universal Serial Bus) dongle to access the service. It costs a year. It works on PCs (Personal Computers) and Macs. It does not give you access to many live TV channels, just archived shows. It does not play on your TV, unless, of course, you have an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) hook up from your computer to your TV. You must install Flash, Silverlight and Windows media player.

How is this low prices possible? They do it by collecting free content and presenting it to you. They don’t even have to serve it. They just hook you up with original content provider. Some of that content is geo-restricted, namely you are blocked from watching it in Canada, the same as you would be if you found it yourself and tried to watch it. It is just the same, including the un-bypassable ads. You could look at Rabbit TV as a sort of gigantic electronic TV Guide to free content. It is not particularly high quality, just what they could find. Nearly all of it is crap. All my picks it told me were unavailable because I live in Canada. To watch PBS (Public Broadcasting System), it wanted the right to send messages to all my circle of acquaintances. That would be inexcusably rude, so I had to forgo.

To use it, you need the dongle and you need to login with a user id and password. The screen says you no longer need the dongle after you have registered, but I cannot get it to work without it.

They ask for your birthdate and gender to register. They have no need for that.

Cracking Geolocation

It works both in the USA and Canada, but some content is blocked to Canada. To access blocked content from Canada, you need a VPN (Virtual Private Network) . To the provider it looks like an ordinary home router and LAN (Local Area Network). However, the VPN can be so huge, it goes all the way to Canada. You have to find someone who has set up such a country-spanning VPN and arrange to use it.

Tantalising

For example, I looked over the various free RabbitTV movies and picked Another Life a WWII (World War II) British drama. Then I fired it up and instead of the movie, up came an apology that the Hulu video was not available in Canada. Rabbit should use its computer to remove the unavailable movies from the Canadian version of the website.

THe Bottom Line

I have been unable to find a single movie I wanted to watch that it would let me watch.