More and more people are seeking their entertainment online. The beauty of watching tv online is that you can watch your favorite shows at your convenience and often without obnoxious commercials.
You don't need to worry about getting to your couch at a certain time. You don't need to worry about setting your tivo (as if that's some impossible task). Heck, you don't even need to be home. And now more and more, you don't even need to be by a computer.
In the past year, online tv has become exponentially better. I wanted to share with you 4 of the best places you can find free tv shows and movies online. To qualify for this list, the website had to have high quality content, it had to provide it for free, and the site had to be well-designed and easy to use.
These four sites fit the bill.
1) Hulu - Backed by Fox and NBC (both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) , Hulu is probably the best place to watch tv online. You can also watch a lot of movies in full streaming videos.
There are all kinds of shows at hulu (click link to read more details about what you can find at the site), from big-name powerhouse shows like Desperate Housewives to House, to canceled (but great!) shows like Arrested Development, and to quirky oldies like Alf and A-Team.
If you're academically inclined, you can watch shows like Nova and National Geographic.
When I found Arrested Development online I almost lost it in a good way. I loved that show. I hear there's a movie in the works.
If you own your own blog or website, you can actually embed full episodes, movies, and clips onto your own posts, which is very cool. It's one extra step of user interaction that pushes Hulu to the forefront of online tv destinations and gives it a great head start out of the gate.
2) Fancast - Gotta love Fancast. The thing I like is the general atmosphere of this website. Owned by Comcast, Fancast is a website that tries to supply every bit of information you could need in regard to tv watching.
You can find full schedules of terrestrial tv shows (how about that phrase?) and other information about your favorite programs. Fancast (more info in another post at the link) will even recommend shows to you based on what you've been interested in previously.
But the best part about the site is the free tv shows and movies you can access and watch right from the site. Honestly, you can find many of the same shows that you can find online at Hulu, but there are some shows that stream exclusively to either site.
Make sure you check out the movie section too.
I recommend both of these sites as online tv destinations.
By the time you get through Hulu and Fancast, you probably won't have time to watch anymore shows online and if you do you will probably be tv-ed out. The breadth of content you can get at the above mentioned sites is pretty extensive.
I'll recommend two more places you can go to find tv online because I know that a lot of personal preference goes into which sites you like. Navigation, set up, video size, etc. These are all ways in which these sites vary.
3) Yahoo Television - Most of the shows here stream from hulu, but the navigation at Yahoo tv is super easy to use and the site is simply laid out. There's an extensive list of the tv shows you can access online at this site.
4) IN2TV - This site, run by a AOL, is a good place to find tv online. You can watch full episodes here just like the other sites I mentioned, and you can get a good mix of quirky, random, and old shows as well.
Right now on the front page you can find featured content such as the Flintstones, old Ben Stiller skits, and the pilot episode of the show Smith, starring Ray Liotta, among other tv links.
See what I mean about random. Sometimes it may be worthwhile to hit this site to see what interesting content you can find.
This is my short list of the best places to find free tv shows and movies online. I hope this will suffice and will quench your tv desires. If it doesn't, then I don't know what to tell you, other than that you are a full-on tv junkie!
1 comments:
Hi, thanks for the shout out to Fancast, we think our library of full-length and FREE TV shows (movies too) is second to none. In addition to Fox and NBC shows we also have great Viacom programming like South Park, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and some great old CBS classics like the Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke shows.
Your readers may be interested to see the list at
http://www.fancast.com/full_episodes
and the movies at
http://www.fancast.com/movies
Cheers,
Jim (for Fancast)
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