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Hulu owns too. Fucking Airwolf? I spent most of my Saturday afternoon (recovering from Friday's half-bottle of scotch induced hangover) watching season 1. Hooked the wife's laptop to the stereo and TV and played it through. It was decent quality, flash player, required a quick sign-up with fake information, and sounded fine. The commercials were less annoying than TV commercials (and much shorter) and I was fine with it.

More closely emulating TV I'm in both the Joost and Hulu betas. Joost might be out of beta now... Anyway, Joost focuses more on providing exclusive/unique content in a streaming and TV-like environment. Joost uses its own application and has a pretty snazzy interface. Hulu is more like a YouTube of TV shows where specific shows (including Family Guy, The Simpsons, The Office, etc...) are streamed on demand, but that at certain intervals during the show you're forced to watch a 30 or 60 second commercial. It's entirely webpage based but does do full-screen video. I ended up watching the first few episodes of the Tin Man, got myself hooked. Also got to finally watch all the Firefly's thanks to Hulu!

Honestly, between those two services and (ahem) other-services-that-rhyme-with-fittorrent (ahem), my roomie canceled our subscription to cable TV... We simply don't need it as we can watch anything we want to within a few seconds (or at most hours) of us wanting to see it.

There are many viable alternatives to standard television. So far the one I use the most often is Miro. It offers a wide variety of video in an easy to use interface. I really like the way it uses rss. That makes it really easy to tell when there are new shows to watch. Also if you want to, Miro can be used to grab "real" tv shows as well.

Another option is Joost. Lots of good stuff there but I find it much more difficult to find out when new episodes of my favorite shows are available so I tend to forget about it.

Finally I have been pleasantly surprised by hulu. Watching old episodes of my favorite shows from the 80's has been fun.

I know that many people don't like to watch TV on their computer but for me placing a 17" laptop on my lap and relaxing on the couch is better than watching our small 32" tv. For the times when others want to watch something as well, I have it setup so that I can easily connect my laptop to the tv and watch it that way. Today's HDTV is almost the same thing as a large computer monitor and usually can be used as such.

Or you could use this site OpenHulu

OpenHulu uses the embedding capability of Hulu for the poor souls not in the beta. You get a few ads but as opposed to nothing it's not too bad. Legally watch Simpsons, Family Guy, Heroes, Battlestar Gallactica, Bionic Woman and more.

If you configure it right, it even works in Linux. (I have to use Mozilla IceApe)

Why rent/buy movies from video stores when you can go to online websites that display any variety of movie for free or for a price. After the closing of TVLINKS.UK, several other websites shot to the forefront to offer the same services TVLINKS offered. If you really want to watch older tv shows (sometimes even newer movies) or older movies/cartoons/documentaries, these sites are better. The local theater I go to offers Saturday and Sunday Matinee's for $2.50 a person, no matter what the movie is. Also if you signed up for the beta testing of HULU.com it's pretty decent. Excellent selection of older material along with some of the newer episodes of your tv programming.

Oh, It's going to be a Battle Royale between the ISP's and the multiple **AA's. DING DING

Watching TV wasn't mentioned in the requirements; if he does, there's always Hulu, Joost, Youtube, or any of a million other sites on every band of the ethical spectrum that's just as accessible from his laptop. Or, he could hook up an 85$ HDTV Tuner and never miss a beat.

Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your region. We apologize for the inconvenience.

So they'll let me browse the Web site with my UK IP, even let me sign up to the private beta with my UK IP, they'll let me load in the flash video viewer with my UK IP (none of this has warnings to say "go way you UK person"), only to be brought to a halt when I actually try play the video. Nice work there, Hulu.

Yet again US TV companies have no clue when it comes it streaming their content to non-US viewers, so it's off to "other locations on the Net" to get a higher quality, ad-free, non-DRM'ed version of the show within 24 hours of airing...

On the corporate blog there is a sample video. The URL to watch any video is of the form:
http://www.hulu.com/embed/1734 In a stunning lack of foresight the number is the primary key of the record in the database. You can enter anything less than 1850 and view the shows. Since they give permission to embed on your own web pages, I've embedded a sample of ten random shows

On the corporate blog there is a sample video. The URL to watch any video is of the form:
http://www.hulu.com/embed/1734 In a stunning lack of foresight the number is the primary key of the record in the database. You can enter anything less than 1850 and view the shows. Since they give permission to embed on your own web pages, I've embedded a sample of ten random shows

Want to bet this has something to do with it?

Hey NBC: I have chosen not to have cable, but want to pay you for Heroes. Guess what my only alternative will be if you pull it from iTunes?