TV Shows: Watching Your Favorite Television Episodes Online

Watching television shows on your computer is actually quite simple and easy to do these days. In fact, there are less commercials if you watch your favorite TV show online.

Several years ago, whenever you wanted to watch your favorite TV show, you had to arrange your schedule so that you were free when it came on the air and was broadcast. Or you had to own a DVR or TIVO and record the live broadcast.

Nowadays, you do not need to do either. If you are busy for a week or even a month, and then want to watch a TV show you can go online and do so. Most networks who provide the TV show have their own website. They will put up the TV show with limited commercial interruptions online for your viewing pleasure. The standard quality is not quite as a good as regular television; however, many networks offer streaming High Definition (HD) options. Of course you will need a very high speed internet connection to stream anything in HD online.

There are many popular TV shows these days that you can watch online. As I said earlier you can visit the particular website of the network that aired the show and then watch it. Most half hour shows will have about 3 or 4 spots for a commercial. Hour-long shows may have more like 5 or 6 spots for a commercial. However, these commercials are usually only either 15 seconds or 30 seconds long. Standard commercials on TV typically last for 2 to 3 minutes for normal television programs. Thus by watching the show online you are saving time you spend viewing commercials.

For me, I personally enjoy watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, and Desperate Housewives online. This is because ABC and Comedy central have effectively figured out how to stream TV shows well. I also usually end up missing many of these shows or want to watch them when it is more convenient for me.

There is also a website called Hulu that lets you watch your favorite TV episodes online. They have made arrangements with many networks so that they can show 5 trailing episodes of shows. For example, recently I was able to watch a few of The Office episodes and also a few of The Simpsons episodes online that I had missed. There were a few commercials, but the viewing experience was very good.

The only problems I have ran into with viewing TV shows online is over at NBC. I am a longtime viewer of Conan O'Brien and enjoy watching him regularly. I have found that when I try to stream past episodes of his show on NBC that it does not run smoothly. There is a lot of lag and static in the stream. I am not quite sure why this occurs may have something to do with the way that NBC's episode player works. All in all though, watching your favorite TV shows and episodes online is very real and possible for anyone to do who wants to watch it again or missed it the first time.