Anything better than

Livestation: http://www.livestation.com/

or

Keyhole: http://www.v2p.jp/video/english/index.html

?

Tried TVants?
http://www.tvants.com/

Has several good channels, like TBS, TV Tokyo etc. Sometimes some of the channels are down though.

See also:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3913

Freshverse is supposed to be good but it's private so I can't say for sure.
TVants takes a while to load for me.
Basically Keyhole is the best thing I've found. ^_^;

Is TVants really worth it compared to keyhole tv which I use? It seems like a big ordeal to getting it work on a mac.

Thanks.

TV Ants is by far the best I've tried. I can't even listen to keyhole - the audio's so poor. Anyway, once a channel buffers (usually 5-20 sec) it plays fine for hours. I have it on streaming several hours a day just fine. The audio's great and the picture quality is good enough to read the subtitles on shows. The last few weeks I've only had access to NTV, TV Tokyo, and TBS regularly but these are all good channels.

Livestation is the second best, but all it has for me is Fuji TV (which is not live like TV Ants, but just just cycling through the 90s news clips of the day). It's the next best thing if the channels on TV Ants are down - Livestation has never been down for me.

Thanks for the impressions. I got it running through Wine and love the quality, especially the audio. Lately Fuji and Asahi has been showing up, but right now nothing. There's a bunch of Chinese channels, wish the same could be said about Japanese.

I tried TV ants, but I couldn't get it to do anything.

TV Ants can be temperamental at times but was a Godsend last year when I was living on a small island in Hawaii and couldn't get Japanese TV.

TV Ants is really great... when it works. Just record some channels while it is working, then you have something to watch, when its not working. Depending where you live, it makes sense to record anyway because the Japanese commercials after midnight aren't that interesting.

I use http://www.tv-rec.com

The good thing is you can stream or download the files. It's not live (which is good for me) but you have access to all the programs from the ongoing week. You can download or steam them by hour. (it's recorded 24/7). There're 6 channels (TBS, TV tokyo, nihon TV, Asahi, NHK and Fuji TV). The quality is quite good. I watch it on my tv at home. (wmv file : 300mb for one hour)

The downside, it's not free. It's 5000 yen per month (no automatic billing) but you can share the subscription with your friends.

the new software allow you to download the programs you want using their tv guide and even to program your recording in advance.