Eric recently posted about how to enrich your brain by getting news and discussion of politics and science. So I'm going to discuss how to numb your brain by getting TV online.
If you are willing to pay then iTunes is great because you can get episodes as they come out (typically less than two day delay) and you then own the episode so you can watch it again. Video podcasts aren't really TV, but are also a good source of video.
I was going to say that youtube is too obvious to mention, but that would be silly so instead I'll just talk about saying it.
The most legal options are to go to the sites of the networks such as nbc, fox, abc, and cbs. These are nice because it is straight forward to go the channel's site and get their shows. However, you have to deal with commercials and they often only post a few of the most recent episodes of each show.
A good next step is to go to sites based on hulu such as openhulu and fancast. Ok, I have no idea what hulu really is, but shows on these sites are very similar to the sites of the networks, but often have episodes that the network sites don't. These sites are also great for watching older shows. The downside is you still have commercials, but everything about the sites is legal (or at least I assume it is or else showing ads is rather lame). Openhulu is better than fancast because all of its shows can be full screen, but many of fancast's cannot.
The next set of sites are all less legal than the above. I of course wouldn't use any of these, but I hear good things. One of the sites that would be my favorite if I wasn't so moral is watchtvsitcoms. From what I hear sometimes it takes a while to load the video so it is best to hit play and then once it starts buffering hit pause then wait for most of the episode to download before watching. This site has quite a few shows and no commercials. It also tends to have full seasons so you don't have to worry about episodes not being there or getting pulled down over time. If you are looking for south park then southparkzone is the place to go. If you are struggling to find a specific episode then you can try peekvid and alluc, but they are a bit of a pain and have a very random assortment of episodes so I consider them last resorts.
If there's anything I'm missing post a comment and let me know.
2 comments:
I'm so glad you showed me watchtvsitcoms. Brought me beautiful things like tower defense game, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Jess and I watched about 2 parts out of 6 of Superbad...
I'll have to try these other suggests!
hulu is the site on the horizon for the networks... combining a bunch of them-- I think fox and NBC are the big ones, but not sure...
I got linked to-- super-cool!
I've actually used Hulu -- I know someone who is beta testing it :-)
It seems to be just a way to have legal, online available TV all in one place. You should sign up. Maybe you'll get into the beta and can test it out!
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