Ever since we learned we could receive some over-the-air stations in high-quality digital format, we've been learning a lot more about modern television.  For one, receiving TV in digital format over-the-air is free yet you get static-free channels that are often better quality than cable or satellite because they have more bandwidth available to them. For us, this means we get NBC, CBS, FOX, and The CW and we would be able to get PBS if we had an antenna.  The analog versions of all of these channels (although there is no analog broadcast of The CW) are bad enough to not want to watch.  The digital versions, though, are 1080i (NBC, CBS) or 720p (FOX) with the exception of PBS and The CW (480i) that are still crystal clear, though.

Ok, so I've written about all of that before.  What's new?  Well, as it turns out, every major television network is now providing full episodes online, for free.  Now why didn't we discover this before we even knew we had broadcast TV available?  Well, TV ads are, sadly, a form of news.  I'd heard about innertube a while back, which is CBSs name for their online videos.  But when it first came out it was like the "special features" of a DVD and not only was it not interesting if you couldn't watch the latest episodes, you'd actually want to avoid it to not get spoilers. 

But then we saw a brief mention of full episodes online and went to look. Sure enough, all of the CSI shows and many other shows were online in full episode format.  And all for free. This includes such shows as Numb3rs, NCIS, Jericho, CSI (3 of them), and Survivor.

This got me curious about the other channels, of course.  In particular, I wanted to check out ABC since we don't get it over-the-air.  Sure enough, all of their popular shows are online.  This includes Lost, which we're now caught up on since they had season-to-date episodes.  We've also started to watch some Ugly Betty, which is apparently good enough to win two awards last Monday night at the Golden Globes.  We're disappointed, though, that they don't have all of this season's Grey's Anatomy episodes online.

Last week we rented the season catch-up disk of Heroes, which plays on NBC.  This disk was disappointing since it was listed as a bit over an hour long.  The Heroes catch-up part was only about 10 minutes long and didn't really even get in to the store.  The other hour was the pilot episode of The Black Donnelly's.  Even more disappointing, though, is that we found out that NBC has the complete season-to-date available for watching online and yes, for free.  NBC calls this "NBC Rewind" so you can catch up on shows.  Want to watch Scrubs? Grease? Studio 60? The Apprentice? Friday Night Lights?  You can.  They're all there.  And, of course, for free.

Over at The CW website we could catch up on our Veronica Mars, but they don't have a few of the early episodes of the season.  They do have full episodes, of course, of many of the shows including Veronica Mars, Beauty and the Geek, Supernatural, and many more.

In fact, Fox seems to be the only network I've checked that doesn't have full episodes online yet.  They do have plenty of clips, of course, but like I mentioned, those are usually no good unless you've seen the shows.  Well, PBS doesn't seem to, either, but that doesn't really come as a surprise. 

Why are full episodes good for the networks?  Well, it's quite easy, actually.  Even though they are free for the viewers, there are often ads either within the video or on the web pages.  So they make more money.  That's good and that also allows us viewers to show support even if we can't watch TV directly (as compared to a torrent download or something).  They are also providing a service for people without a Tivo or ReplayTV to be able to watch missed episodes.  This is good for people that are out of town or even watching a competing show on another network.  For those shows with the full season online, it allows someone to come in even in the middle of a season after friends have recommended it.  For example, we can watch all of Heroes online now and then start watching it over-the-air in full HD. 

Quality wise, it'll be a long time before the online shows can match the over-the-air broadcasts since ATSC has nearly a full 20 Mbps of bandwidth to it and most folks in the US top out at around 8 Mbps or so on their net connections. The experience varies quite a lot, too, and usually isn't TV ready. 

On ABC, the shows play inside a small video window inside the browser.  For the best experience, I set our 1920x1080 TV to 800x600, standard aspect, and have the video playing inside that where it's still widescreen.  This gives about 25" out of 40" to the video.  That's not terrible, but it's not great, either.  When we start watching the other networks, I'm sure we'll have to figure out their best settings, too. In all likelihood, for those shows that we really want to watch, we'll catch up online and then watch them over-the-air in full HD where it's full screen, good quality, and largely skip free.

The networks' own players may end up largely competing with download services such as iTunes and XBox Live where you can already get episodes each for $2-3.  Some of these are in full HD, which is great, but some are in even lower quality or designed for a portable screen.  Sure, both of these great download service have slightly different target audience from full episodes on the web and each other, but there are sure to be other people out there who will opt for a free, legal solution where one exists.

Posted by Shane on January 23, 2007 8:08 AM | Permalink