TV on Your Computer from the Internet

Why would anyone want to watch TV on their computer? Typically the picture was either tiny or very blurry (pixelated, actually, which means made up of squares that are noticeably too big) and sometimes jerky. Who'd want that?

Well, times have changed and so has TV on the internet. Today, most people have broadband (cable or DSL) as opposed to dial-up. Hulu.com now offers hundreds of current and newer TV shows in two resolutions with multiple window sizes. If your computer screen is large enough and your cable or DSL connection is decent, you can watch any of these shows, any time you want for free. While some of them contain commercials, there will typically be only one 30-second spot every 15 minutes. (But hey, you watch 18 minutes of commercials on broadcast TV per hour. I think 2 minutes is an improvement.) You can skip around inside the show and watch parts over but if you try to skip past a commercial, it'll make you watch it.

Now, don't get me wrong, Hulu is not in HD (except for a very few offerings) but it's probably better than your old analog TV set. And you get to watch what you want, when you want. Did you miss an episode of a favorite? No need to wait for the re-run (with my luck, I'd miss that too). Now you can watch it with Hulu. (And they have movies!)

Hulu has streaming video, which means you watch it as it comes to you across the internet. This is as opposed to video you download and store to watch later.

There are also even better solutions as well, albeit with less variety. NBC has a downloadable viewer that allows you to then download selected shows from their site to watch later. The great thing about this is that, while you have to wait for the show to load (and this could take a long time), you never suffer from "the jerkies" and the picture is sharper. In fact, about half of their shows are available in HD. But if you're in a hurry, this is not a viable solution. I'd start downloading before you go to bed or to work. Be aware that you only have 48 hours after downloading to watch the show before it magically evaporates from your hard drive. And HD TV shows take lots of space, so be prepared with gigabytes of available hard drive space. NBC recommends 10-20 gigabytes of free space.

NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC offer a service similar to Hulu (streaming video, rather than downloaded). All offer most shows in HD. Results here, will vary with your bandwidth (that is, the speed of your internet connection). As always, the faster the better and the higher the resolution (HD as opposed to standard definition) the more bandwidth (speed) required. If you run out of bandwidth, the show stops until the data streaming catches up. This never happens when you'd want it to (probably because you'd never want it to).

So what do you pay for any of this? Nothing at all.

Now it's time to think about that big, widescreen monitor.