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Eight Channels

WaveTop broadcasts over signals from PBS's 264 member stations; when your local station shuts down for the night, the updates stop. Content is organized into eight "channels" that appear as buttons in IE 4.0 (the service won't work with other browsers). Except for channels from Time Inc. and ZDNet, most of these are proprietary (NewsTop, StockTop, KidsTop, etc.), based on content from USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Weather Channel, Quote.com, and CBS SportsLine. Depending on the number of channels you activate, WaveTop saves as much as 170MB of data to a cache on your hard drive, which it cleans every 10 days.

Another button, GuideTop, displays a content delivery timetable--an important feature since you can't use your tuner to watch TV while WaveTop is downloading. If you were planning to watch a lot of TV on your monitor, this could pose a real problem: Updates range in frequency from every 15 minutes (for Quote.com) to once a week. Also, if you leave your PC on 24 hours a day to catch all updates (as WaveTop recommends), expect your hard disk to click away like a metronome as long as your computer is on and your local PBS outlet is broadcasting.

The service is free--advertisers include Barnes & Noble, the Spiegel Catalog, Ford, and CyberMeals--but there's a catch: To receive it, you must give WaveTop some demographic information about yourself. WaveTop vice president Sandy Goldman says that the company supplies this information--along with page-viewing reports--in aggregate to advertisers; individual subscriber data stays confidential, so you won't get spammed.