Television? On my computer?

I've been in a new apartment for about a month now, and I don't have a TV. A couple years ago, I would have burned something down if I had to go a month without a television, but now seems like a perfect time to do it. A couple years ago I went a year with only rabbit-ears. That got pretty tough, although I did gain a great appreciation for Ken Burns. Now there are many options for viewing TV on your computer, completely for free.

Of course, by now, you have heard of Hulu. NBC...Fox...Disney....blah blah blah. Hulu is great. It has a lot of great traditional TV shows available shortly after they air. This is the easiest way to keep up on shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Daily Show, House, etc. Hulu has a bunch of movies, too. Many videos are available in 480p, which is pretty sweet.

My favorite discovery since going TV-less is Miro. Miro was formerly known as Democracy Player, and is completely open source. It has a sleek interface and thousands of "channels" available. Instead of streaming content, Miro downloads episodes entirely before you can watch them. This sounds bad at first, I know, but after a short wait, you get a much higher quality video than you could get with Hulu. Miro claims to have "the most free HD"., and I don't doubt them. Miro doesn't feature as much mainstream content as Hulu, but it does have a lot of great programming. Most interesting to me is the fact that you can start you own channel if you maintain a video podcast.

My favorite channels on Miro come from Revision3 in California. If you were a gigantic fan of the old TechTV mainstays The Screen Savers and Call for Help (like I was), these channels should be right up your alley. Here, you can regularly see the faces of your long lost heroes; Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on Diggnation, Patrick Norton and Roger Chang on Tekzilla, alongside Veronica Belmont, and more Patrick Norton and David Calkins on Systm. I enjoy these shows a lot, and the nostalgia only adds to the experience.

Oh yeah, there's also Joost. Joost was created by the creators of Kazaa and Skype. It is definitely worth checking out. Joost has been striving to make deals with major content distributors, like Viacom and CBS. Joost uses P2P technology to distribute content, which should be expected from the creator of Kazaa.

Anywho, these three are my recommendations. There are non-free options out there, but I'm cheap. Check them out, and maybe you can drop the satellite and pocket a little extra cash.