The Internet is now a place where unlicensed television shows can be watched, through websites offering streaming, torrents, or USENET. Recently, many websites have started to show online shows for free, but do so in a legal fashion, paying for the shows using advertisements. Different websites will work in different areas, but a large number of sites are available to viewers from the United States only. Here are a few resources to watch tv shows online.
South Park Studios famously provided their shows online free of charge because the show’s creators were annoyed of people watching their shows illegally. Unfortunately, South Park Studios is not available in Great Britain. It is probably only in North America.
Joost, the much hyped IPTV service which has recently made the transition from software to web-based, boasts a number of titles, both mainstream and online-only. In the UK, and possibly other countries, titles such as Babylon 5, Shameless, Peep Show and Robot Chicken.
YouTube has recently announced it will start offering full-length “TV Dinners” including shows like Star Trek: The Original Series, MacGyver and Beverly Hills 90210. Unfortunately, this will not be available in Europe.
Hulu is a site which offers free, ad-supported streaming video of TV shows and films from NBC and FOX, as well as others. This will include shows like The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy and The Office! Predictably, this is also only for Americans.
BBC iPlayer is a free streaming video service kindly provided to people in the United Kingdom. iPlayer allows Brits to watch most shows broadcasted on a BBC channel in the past week on-demand. The BBC even admits that iPlayer technically does not require a licence fee, a type of tax which any British person with a TV set pays to help support the non-commercial BBC.