Therefore, most are of good video quality. But they do contain ads, and the number of episodes you can watch varies widely from three of CBS' hit show "CSI" to what appears to be a full season of NBC's "30 Rock."
Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp., allows you to stream current shows from NBC and Fox the day after they air and provides content past and present from 50 other providers, such as Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros. So it's your choice: "The Office" or "Fantasy Island." And you have the option of watching in high resolution, unlike at some other sites.
You can watch shows from many of these networks on MSN TV, AOL and other portals. Joost, TidalTV and Veoh are also good places to watch television from years past, as well as a handful of episodes from current shows. If you like to watch National Geographic or Discovery Channel programs, you can check out Miro, which offers thousands of options, mostly from independent content providers and with excellent video quality.
One nice thing about watching network shows online is that you can watch an entire season's worth of episodes at a time (if you want) or catch episodes you missed from seasons past. Most of the sites seem to have a full-screen option.
The downside of watching a streaming show, especially if you are using a wireless connection, is that there's the occasional freeze or hitch and the audio and video can get out of sync. Joost and Miro also require downloads of their media players.
And, of course, you have good old YouTube and Daily Motion for getting the occasional television episode and short video, should sitcoms start to bore you.
TV on the black market: If you don't want to bother with streaming episodes in real time, you can look for torrent files of your favorite shows on file-sharing sites and use free BitTorrent software such as Tomato Torrent to download these files.
The upside is that viewers can get entire seasons at a time and burn them onto DVDs. Of course, this particular method is called piracy, and it's illegal. But because enforcement of federal piracy law has focused more on sites offering the pirated material than on the people using them, many people take their chances on sites like The Pirate Bay, a Swedish-run Web site made notorious after police raided its offices and seized its servers in 2006.
The big screen for free
Finding free big-budget movies can be a lot more difficult, depending on what you want to watch. No studio is eager to let you watch "The Dark Knight" or "Mamma Mia" for nada when they could charge you $11 a ticket. But there are ways to catch flicks for free, both at the theater and in your own home.
At home: One of the best ways to see relatively recent films for free is to check them out from the poor man's Netflix: your local library. If you can't find something you like on the shelf, you can request it from another branch and have it shipped there.
The downside to library borrowing is that you never know what you're going to get or when you're going to get it. And you may have to wait a week to get that hold from another branch. But you're assured of good video quality, and it's totally legal.
At the cineplex: If you want to get out of the house and watch a movie on the big screen, you can register at sites such as FilmMetro and The Screening Exchange to receive free tickets for new movie screenings in your city. These sites book screenings all over the country.
You can also go directly to the studio and film production Web sites, such as Paramount or Miramax, to find free showings in your area.
On the Web: Finding movies to stream instantly on your computer for free is a little more complicated. There are a handful of legal sites that offer streaming movies with a few commercial interruptions.
The most promising is probably Hulu, which on a recent visit had titles such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Sideways" in its movie library, with ads to bring in a little money.
Veoh also has some movie content. However, you're more likely to find older flicks, such as the Muppet movies and "Labyrinth," with David Bowie, than more recent titles.
Most studios are afraid to put their movies out there on the Web -- even ones that were released years ago -- for fear of losing revenue from DVD sales, says Will Richmond, the editor of VideoNuze.
"I think people are still trying to figure out how to monetize a two-hour (online) movie," he says.
For people willing to flout piracy laws, there are hundreds if not thousands of sites out there that offer movies to stream, commercial-free, over your computer.
However, many of these sites promise certain blockbusters, only to say that they have been removed from the site when you click on them. Others are shut down entirely after a few months by lawsuits from the Motion Picture Association of America.
So there's a lot of searching with only minimal finding. Most searches direct you to third-party sites, many of them foreign, that provide the movies.
But there are a ton of problems with streaming movies at these sites:
- Many of the films are of poor quality. Some are shot in a theater with a video camera; some have terrible sound.
- Many that are of good quality can't be seen in full-screen mode.
- They are often broken into several parts to play one after the other.
- They can take a long time to load, and if you get them to work, they can be riddled with hiccups depending on how you connect to broadband.
- You have to put up with lots of pop-up ads from gambling and pornographic sites.
The bottom line: Though there's a lot out there to watch for free, it's not as easy as simply clicking a button on your remote control. That's why you haven't seen big drop-offs in the number of cable and satellite subscribers, says Scherf, the technology analyst.
"It's inevitable, but we're not there yet," he says. And unfortunately, he adds, "we won't be there for some time to come."