With the increased original content, overall video quality and syndication of television shows from major networks, Internet television is becoming bigger than ever, and I invite you to join the revolution. Many of us know how it started. Google Video and YouTube launched in 2005, and from then on hundreds of thousands of videos have been submitted, ranging from Vlogs (video blogs) to cute animal videos to music videos of up-and-coming indie artists. Now YouTube and Google Video are two of hundreds of Internet TV sites and the number of original content has grown exponentially.
Here is an incomplete list of my favorite destinations for Internet TV and why you should definitely check them out. Readers beware: it gets a bit geeky.
This wouldn’t be a legitimate list if I didn’t include Hulu.com. Hulu is, very easily, your answer to cable television. The website syndicates popular television shows from channels such as Comedy Central, NBC, PBS, Fox, G4, Bravo and Disney Channel. The best thing about Hulu is that a lot of episodes are released the day after they premiere on television. It’s not a bad trade-off for students and teachers who are hard at work on a weeknight and aren’t able to see the original airtime of Tuesday night’s Daily Show. Besides The Daily Show, my favorite shows to watch on Hulu are the “Colbert Report,” “Saturday Night Live,” “House,” “24,” “The Office” and “Lost.” Of course, I still prefer to watch some of these on the original airtimes due to my own obsessions (“Lost,” “24”), but it’s a great site to fall back on if you can’t manage to turn on the tele in time.
Next up is AdultSwim.com/Video. This is for anyone who grew up during Nickelodeon’s best years with “Rocko’s Modern Life,” “Ren & Stimpy” and “Angry Beavers.” Adult Swim has a very strong arsenal of adult-oriented cartoons (not porn, sorry), anime and other strange amalgamations involving the creativity of hysterical and bizarre people such as Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job!). If you have a special place in your heart for outlandish humor and downright strangeness, Adult Swim is for you. My favorite shows include “Tim and Eric Awesome Show,” “Robot Chicken” (stop-motion animation by Seth Green), “The Venture Bros,” “Harvey Birdman: Attourney at Law” (featuring Stephen Colbert), “Home Movies” and “Metalocalypse.”
For your video game needs, GameTrailers.com has a lot to offer for fans of Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony and PC games. While it mainly features trailers and HD footage of upcoming games such as Resident Evil 5 and Killzone 2, GameTrailers has a few channels streaming original content about video games. If you remember the good ol’ days of the G4 network (what used to be a video game channel, now more like SpikeTV), you’ll remember original shows such as G4TV.com, Judgement Day, Filter and Portal that were 100% dedicated to video games. GameTrailers has brought back that kind of dedication with channels like ScrewAttack, GTTV, Bonus Rounds and Retrospectives. The Angry Video Game Nerd is one of my favorite shows on the ScrewAttack channel. It features a 20-30 year old video game nerd who plays it old school and reviews rather unknown video games from the past, often to his great frustration and demise, and hilarity ensues. Retrospectives is another cool channel streams special videos that look back at popular game franchises such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto.
Last but not least, there is Revision3.com, an Internet TV network completely dedicated to all of computer geekdom and beyond. Revision3 is one of the spiritual successors (besides TwiT.TV) to the network television channel, TechTV, that was mercilessly crushed by the hands of G4 execs who didn’t think computer technology was an important enough subject for its own channel (ahh, anger!). While I don’t watch shows on Revision3 very often, many of them do have a strong following including Diggnation (a video companion to the popular news-agregating site Digg.com), The Totally Rad Show (a show that covers the facets of geek culture such as video games, comic books, DVD boxsets and more), and Systm (a DIY show that teaches the common geek how to build awesome things such as lightsabers, USB battery packs, a portable N64 and more).
There are many other internet TV sites out there such as Blip.TV, Joost (similar to Hulu; different network coverage), and Olde English (an infectious comedy troupe- check out Derrick Comedy too). With all of this original and sydicated content available online, it begs to ask the question: why do so many people pay for both cable TV and an internet connection? It seems to me you can save a lot of money if you turned off the boob tube and moved online. Worried about watching things on a tiny computer screen? No worries, just hook your display to a modern TV setup. Now you’re living like a king (or queen- gender roles confuse me these days).