Watching TV online, Part I

Michael, my special friend, loves Ghost Whisperer. Michael, being a starving graduate student, doesn't subscribe to cable TV, and because we live in the middle of nowhere, this means he gets no TV at all, not even the one station that actually broadcasts from our city! Because I am a librarian who exhibits my love for people by finding information for them, I decided to track down a place where he can watch Ghost Whisperer online. I have been totally defeated and had to admit that there's no place where you can legally watch that show online, but I looked at so many online TV sites in the meantime that I decided to post that information on my blog to help others. I've been trying to put it up as one monster post for the last month, but it always seemed too daunting, so I've finally decided to break the information down into categories and post it gradually over the next few days. So today we get the easy part that I can do from home without benefit of my notes: watching TV on the network sites.

ABC has what I think is the classiest player. It always seems to work perfectly without choppiness, and it delivers the video in flawless fullscreen mode if your internet connection can handle that. There is one 30-second commercial break at every point where there were commercials in the original show. They have one sponsor for each show and show different ads for that sponsor during each break. Some of the ads are interactive, and some of them are actually quite fun! What I love is that it asks you to click to continue and go back to the show after the ad, which might sound annoying but actually means that you can get up and do something during the commercial without fear of missing the beginning of the show. The only drawback that I found to the ABC player has been recently solved. It used to be you'd have to go into the player and load this massive graphic menu of all the episodes of every show before you could watch any of them. That took forever even on our superfast connection at the library. Now you first choose the show you want, and then choose from a list of available episodes, and then the player launches with just that episode. It works much, much better! Last year ABC had every episode of all the new shows available all year, but now they've gone to what seems to be the standard model this year: only the last 4 episodes are available online, which still means you've got a month to catch up.

The NBC player has a combination of clips, episode synopsis, and full episodes, and it's sometimes hard to separate them out. Once you find the full episodes of the show you want, you get a choice of the episodes available (again, the standard last 4) and the many many small chunks of that episode. The chunking feature is something I don't like. Even though, if you start at the first chunk, the rest of them start playing automatically when they need to, the process doesn't go smoothly. Because of my superfast university connection, I would like to default to fullscreen (which actually isn't very big on this player anyway), but I can't. After every chunk it goes back to the teeny tiny window, and often it won't even let me revert to the fullscreen mode when I try. The NBC player is also a little strange because they play the same ad at you after every chunk, so by the time you're done watching an hour-long show, you've seen the same ad about 8 times and want to shoot yourself!

I don't use the CBS player a lot, but from what I've seen it's adequate. They separate out full episodes easily enough, although they only have a handful of their shows available to watch online. (Hence why we're having trouble figuring out where to watch Ghost Whisperer.) It looks like they only have two or 3 episodes of most of the shows available, as well. A good thing is that they don't have many ad breaks at all. A bad thing is that they don't use regular TV ads, but instead annoying internet ads that you've probably seen 5 million times already. I've had problems getting the fullscreen option to work at all.

The CW player has a nice interface on the main page. You can easily choose to watch full episodes by show (they seem to have the standard last 4 available). One problem is that the "fullscreen" mode is very tiny, and it reverts back to the "normal" view at random intervals.

Fox has the newest player of the networks, since they were so late getting into the game. Because of this, it has the fanciest interface. They don't seem to have a standard number of episodes available for each show. One annoyance is that the most recent episode of each show starts playing immediately after you click on the show's name, which is bothersome if you weren't ready for that episode yet. (If you look way down at the bottom of the screen, there's a little arrow that you can click on to see the rest of the episodes available for that show.) I was amazed that they put the Simpsons on here for free; that's the only show I watch on Fox anymore, so that's the only one I've actually tried watching.

Well, there you have it. In future days I'll be posting about other (legal) kinds of sites where you can watch full episodes of TV shows both old and new.