Watching TV can be seen as a much tamer form of Russian roulette. When you press the button you have no idea what’s going to happen. If you are extremely lucky you’ll find yourself face to face with a work of genius. However, it is far more likely that you’ll merely stumble upon the latest episode of a pointless soap-opera, reality TV program, or some other form of mindless shit that television executives love to shove down our throats for some bizarre reason. The rare programs that make television worth watching are few and far between. The reruns are even rarer, so if you miss it, or want to see it again, you’re completely out of luck, while the all too familiar stream of crap seems to come at you from all sides and on every channel. You could always buy the DVDs, except you don’t have the money to waste.
If you’re with me so far, you will be happy to learn that the dark age of watching television is coming to an end. Now you can watch what you want, when you want. Well, maybe. The important thing is that there is now a better way to watch TV. Well, sort of anyway.
The first little catch is that you have to have a computer. Secondly, it has to be connected to the internet. Preferably broadband, this little watch-TV-free scheme probably won’t run so smoothly on dial-up. But as long as you’ve got that, you should be fine. In recent times several websites have sprung up that provide people like you and me with free access to the TV show of our choice. This is made possible by websites like Youtube, Google Video and Dailymotion which allow registered users to upload videos. The idea is that they upload their own home videos and amateur films for the world to see. Technically it is illegal to upload copyrighted material and the hosts will usually remove any illegally uploaded material they come across. But there are far too many uploads for them to check them all and the majority of files will slip through.
There are many websites that contain thousands of links to various TV shows. These websites are not illegal in of themselves for they do not host the files themselves, only the links. Some are better than others. Many have completely unique sets of links, while others just seem to be exact copies of each other.
Before all your hopes are raised so high that they crash into the ceiling, there are a few more catches. For one thing, the list of shows that is uploaded is fairly limited. You’ll find many well known, popular programs of all kinds, but the more obscure the program, the less likely you are to find it. You won’t have much trouble finding episodes of The Simpsons, but you almost certainly won’t find that little known Japanese TV show that you accidentally saw one episode of back in 1996.
The other main catch is that the television networks are well aware that people are illegally uploading their intellectual property onto the internet and they are doing all they can to put a stop to it. You’ll find that many links you click on simply won’t work; they’ll just show you a message explaining why the file has been taken down. There is a constant battle between the television companies and the people dedicated to uploading the material. Usually, links that are taken down will be replaced with fresh ones in a matter of time.
My personal recommendations are:
* Http://www.tv-links.co.uk – Great site with lots of well organised, easy to find links. This site is regularly updated.
* http://www.alluc.org – Great site. Huge selection of regularly update links. They aren’t too well organised though and while they try to organise episodes by seasons, you’ll often find that the list of episodes are incomplete and haven’t been put into any particular order.
* http://www.peekvid.com – Another site with an enormous number of television links, some of which appear to be unique to this very site. Once again, the organisation of the links isn’t too great and I’m not sure how regularly they are updated. Be warned, this site is pop-up heavy. Other than that, this is definitely one of the best.
It’s very likely that what you are looking for won’t be on any of these sites. In that case, you could always try http://dailyepisodes.com or http://www.ovguide.com which have huge selections of links to a variety of different TV websites. If you still have no luck, try searching http://www.youtube.com, http://video.google.co.uk/, http://www.dailymotion.com/, http://www.veoh.com or http://www.guba.com.
If you still can’t find what it is you seek, you could always try BitTorrent. The disadvantage of BitTorrent is that you have to actually download the files onto your computer, which can not only be a lengthy procedure, but videos tend to take up a fair bit of hard drive space as well. First of all, you’ll need a special program that allows you to download torrents (I use bitcomet - http://www.bitcomet.com). Then you just need to find the files you want by searching BitTorrent websites. The biggest tend to be http://www.mininova.org, http://thepiratebay.org,
So there you have it. Turn off your television set and start up your computer. What else are you going do with all your free time, go outside?