Watch TV Shows Online With Fancast
The latest in a long list of websites that let you watch TV shows online is Fancast, a free service released in January by Comcast, the largest provider of cable television in the United States.
Fancast has probably the largest and most diverse collection of TV shows of the bunch, but is all it’s cracked up to be? I spent some time reviewing the website and here’s what I found…
Getting Started With Fancast - Free Registration
Fancast is currently a public beta, meaning anybody can watch TV shows online at the Fancast website, but it might not work right. Registration is completely free — and not required if you just want to watch TV.
If you do sign up, you get recommendations on what you’ll probably like to watch, and you can keep track of your favorite videos.
I decided to sign up. To do so, you first need to click “Sign In,” and from their you can click “Register.” The process only took a few seconds.
Buggy Firefox Support From Fancast?
I glanced through the list of most popular shows and clicked on an episode of USA’s popular mystery show Psych, about a genius detective who pretends to be psychic.
Right away, I ran into a small hitch. The video froze after two seconds. Nothing I could do would get it going again. I had the same problem with every other video I tried.
Ultimately, I switched to Internet Explorer (I’d been using Firefox) and the problem went away. Ouch. In my mind, Firefox support is one of the most important features of any service like this. For the Comcast website to not have it is a big problem.
However, Fancast’s FAQ says they support Firefox version 2 and above. I checked Google to see if anyone else had had similar problems, and got nothing. So although I had problems, it would probably work just fine for you.
Watching Full-Length TV Episodes
Thankfully, everything worked smoothly in Internet Explorer. The video quality is not excellent, but tolerable. Other websites have much higher resolution videos. I would also have liked to see a full-screen feature — most sites already have that, too.
You can easily rate episodes. I enjoyed Psych, so I gave it 4 stars. Curiously, nobody else had ever rated that particular episode.
Each show has a large number of production videos, behind-the-scenes clips, and extensive interviews with the actors and producers.
Watching Movie Trailers And Full-Length Movies
Fancast has a small number of full-length movies available free on their website. At the moment, the list includes “The Jerk,” “October Sky,” “Master and Commander,” “Weekend At Bernie’s,” “Sideways,” and “Bulworth.”
I did not watch an entire movie, but I did watch the first few minutes of one. Movies are “formatted to fit your screen, to run in the time allotted, and edited for content.” Presumably these are the same versions of the movies you see on normal Comcast TV.
Advertising During Episodes On Fancast
Now, let’s talk about advertising. Ads on online TV are a massive improvement over TV on an actual TV. Whereas while watching an episode of 24 on normal cable TV you might have to sit through five minutes of commercials every fifteen minutes, ads on Fancast are limited to short 10-30 second clips several times per episode.
Many online video websites have extremely painful advertising — often they only play one commercial over and over again, forcing you to sit through the same 30 second clip repeatedly.
But for the most part, the ads on Fancast did not bother me. In fact, I kind of enjoyed them. I’ve always liked eSurance’s commercials.
But there was one problem. Usually, commercial breaks play between scenes. However, Fancast seems to play them several seconds too late, often intruding onto the next scene, sometimes even in the middle of an important sentence.
On an episode of Psych, for example, the main character announced, “Judge, I argue that this tape should not be –” Only after another thirty second eSurance commercial did I hear the end of the sentence: “–be admissible in court.”
In conclusion, Fancast is more than enough to pull me away from my TV set to my computer. What I liked best about it was it’s clean, speedy interface.
But while Comcast has pulled together an impressive array of shows from many different networks, websites like Hulu and AOL, and pay services like iTunes and Amazon, still surpass it in other areas.
