8 Ways To Watch TV Shows Online

Heads up, couch potatoes! TV on the internet is getting huge. Huge enough to completely shut down the entire industry for over three months — that’s what the whole writer’s strike was about, you know.

Dozens of websites now offer entire seasons of shows on-demand for free. And with more and more people starting to watch TV shows online, do you even need your TV set anymore? Maybe not.

Take a look at the 8 places to go when you want to watch tv online for free…

1. OpenHulu. Hulu’s a joint venture between NBC and Fox, currently in private beta. But members in the private beta have sneakily taken advantage of Hulu’s built-in sharing features and uploaded all the content to a public site called OpenHulu.com. You can get full-length episodes from both of those networks, and also from Bravo, FX, Sci Fi, Oxygen, and more.
2. television.AOL.com/video has all the content offered by Hulu and more. They’ve partnered with CBS to offer shows like CSI.
3. Comedy Central has thousands of hilarious clips totally free on their website from the Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and a number of other programs.
4. Fancast is Comcast’s new TV website. It’s still in beta, but shaping up to be the best of the bunch. As America’s largest provider of cable television, they’re best suited to provide episodes from the most networks, which is exactly what they’re doing. You can track TV schedules, and find production information and resources for shows.
5. ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, and AMCtv.com, and others. Individual networks usually let you watch shows online on their websites. The problem with this method, though, is network websites usually only have the past three or four episodes available. You can’t watch old episodes or past seasons, like you can on Hulu, Fancast, or others.
6. BitTorrent. This one has the unfortunate problem of being illegal. At the moment, there’s been no legal action against people who download TV shows on BitTorrent, but be warned that it’s an extremely insecure filesharing service, and by using it you could be caught very easily.
7. iTunes has shows from dozens of networks for $1.99 per episode. Why would you pay for a show when you can get it free on one of these other sites? Because iTunes supports putting shows on your iPod, which is just plain awesome.
8. Amazon Unbox is another pay website offering TV (and movies) for download. The advantage here is the high-res, DVD quality videos, which you can play full screen on your PC. You can also rent seasons of shows.

What we really need is one website that combines shows from all the networks. It should let you watch TV shows online, download episodes to our PCs, and they should work on all devices, from iPod to Zune to your cellphone. As a fan of classic TV, it’s nice to be able to watch old tv shows online too. Some sites offer that, some don’t.
But we’ve got a long way to go before that’s reality. iTunes and Amazon Unbox come closest at the moment, but neither is free, and iTunes only works on the iPod, of course.