Wow. Well the filesystem on the 250gb drive in the myth box shat on itself about a week ago, so the apartment has been forced to watch TV live with the past week :'(. I read a short article announcing the opening of the Yahoo! Go for TV service, so I gave the HTPC a quick winXP install today (yes, I have a project, two papers, and a Discrete Math II homework assignment due tomorrow) and gave it a go. So far, I am very impressed. While watching TV there is no audio right now, though I'm using the Intervideo codec that I would normally use with the three tuners. The big draw for the Yahoo service is the On Demand content which, though limited in this early stage of the beta, works very well. If I had to describe the experience in one word, it would be "polished".

It integrates with Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, Launch (for music vids, etc), and has on demand content from ABC News, National Geographic, and a few other sources. It streams everything, but the buffering time is completely acceptable. The only ads that I have experienced so far are when watching music videos. Also, if you are watching a music video from a playlist (like say "Top 100 Videos"), when a video finishes it goes directly to the next one, already buffered, with no ads in between. Oh and the video ads are 30 seconds max, some 10 seconds.

Overall for being such an early beta it really isn't bad. Since there's no audio for the TV tuner cards (I still need to see if there's audio viewing the TV tuners in other programs), I haven't explored the DVR functionality of it other than browsing the program guide and stuff.