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Television Revived Online

Submitted by Jennifer Conley on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 14:46

Technology

At first it was a conscious decision to remove television from my life. I wanted to free myself from the Viagra, Match.com, and ED commercials. And I no longer wanted the television media telling me what to care about today. Rather I wanted to care about the issues affecting our world today, and not today's Fox News headline, "Bigfoot Trackers Say They've Got a Body."

It has been one year since I have owned a television set. I have spent countless hours listening to NPR, reading the Times, clicking on BBC. As time has passed, and after I learned a thing or two about what is real news vs. what is fed to you on TV, I started to have a recurring sense of nostalgia for the clever and absurd comedy shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Family Guy. It was time to revive television, but I didn't want to take it to the extreme and have it on all the time. And that's when I turned to TV online.

Here is my list for the top online sites to watch TV:

Hulu | http://www.hulu.com/

FanCast | http://www.fancast.com/

ABC | http://abc.go.com/

MySpace Primetime | http://www.myspace.com/primetime

NBC | http://www.nbc.com/

TV Land | http://www.tvland.com

However, the problem still remained: The "buy this, smell better, and you'll have more friends" advertisements. I wanted to avoid commercials all together. I moved over to iTunes and now I purchase and download single and full season TV shows to watch when I cannot sleep or when I need to "tune out." The benefit of paying for shows vs. free shows - no commercials and zero server load time because the show is downloaded to your harddrive.

There you have it. TV revived online.

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Thanks for updates the news

Submitted by Sean Keeley on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 10:32.

Thanks for updates the news ...

Livestation

Submitted by Rachel Scott on Thu, 01/15/2009 - 14:27.

Livestation, http://www.livestation.com, is good too, although you have to download a player. Highlights are Al-Jazeera and BBC World News. iPhone streaming coming soon, so they say.

I do online TV too

Submitted by Dustin Currie on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 15:14.

When I moved to Dallas I didn't take a TV with me. I wanted to go a year without a TV. I went 2 years.

Then I broke down and bought a ginormous LCD HDTV. I actually created the microsite for that TV :)

But I still can't give cable any money. And there's no way I can schedule time around TV.

Internet TV works great for me. I just extend my Desktop to the TV and run Internet TV on it. NBC HD is pretty sweet. You actually get to download the episodes as opposed to being stuck streaming them.

Amazon has a service called Unbox - well, maybe they are calling it video on demand now. It's an iTunes alternative for those of us who see Apple as more evil than AT&T and Time Warner :)

So yeah, even as someone who has a TV, I primarily use Internet TV.