Alternative source for free TV episodes

Hulu has been less than reliable lately, which makes one search for alternatives. Tired of watching lagging streams filled with commercials one might try simple downloading your favorite TV series here: www.icefilms.info

They usually post links to megaupload and rapidshare and feature all the big shows like Heroes, Bones, House MD and Fringe. And it is a pretty fast alternative to steaming, your average episode would weigh around 300MB and would download in 30 minutes.

As always, keep checking back with our blog for more news about free online streaming!

Skip Hulu Commercials

Update 2011/08/22: Seems like Adblock Video Firefox Extension is successfully blocking and skipping Hulu commercials again. No more ads on Hulu, but for how long?


Update 2011/08/17: As of now I am not aware of any sure way how to skip ads on Hulu. There is a Chrome extension that strips ads from YouTube videos, you install it from Chrome Webstore

Ever wanted to skip those annoying 30 second commercials on Hulu? Now you can by simply using Firefox and installing Adblock Plus (one of the most popular Firefox extensions):

The Firefox extension Adblock Plus version 1.02 enabled and subscribed to "Easylist USA" causes all commercials except the 7 second intro commercial to be skipped. The screen goes dark for a few seconds at each commercial - then the show resumes.

Great for people who don't like their online streams to be interrupted by obtrusive commercial breaks.

Lost and Gray's Anatomy Streams are Coming to Hulu, Boxee For Windows Streams Hulu

ABC (owned by Disney) has recently announced their partnership with our favorite online streaming site Hulu. This comes as a devastating strike to Google who was also negotiating a deal with ABC to put some of their streaming content on YouTube. Rejoice, you can now stream episodes of Gray's Anatomy and Lost from Hulu with very few commercial interruptions.

Hulu, a joing partnership of NBC and Fox has now added Disney, which brings it to 3 out 4 nationwide TV networks. Only CBS is missing, despite that Hulu more and more becomes the central place to watch your free streams online. Hulu is not the best place to stream movies though, only TV shows and other non-feature content.

In unrelated news, the open source media center Boxee has now released an aplha version that runs on Windows. They also fixed Hulu streaming problems. You can download a private alpha here.

Boxee also supports Joost, MTV, Youtube and many other online streaming sources. It can stream music from Pandora and Last.FM, not to mention all the movies, pictures and MP3's on your computer or in your network.

Google adds Movies, TV Shows

Google today added movie and TV show streaming content to its YouTube website. Some of the big names are are Sony, CBS, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, BBC and independent film studio Lions Gate Entertainment. There are advertisements inside the streams and they cannot be skipped, but hey! it's free! A lot of the shows are the "oldies", but you can find some golden nuggets there like the Cliffhanger (1993). To check out their free streams go to a separate section linked from YouTube's main menu, titled Shows.

This is yet another desperate attempt from Google to monetize their online streaming services. The user generated content hosted on YouTube hardly bring any revenue and is hard to pitch to the advertisers, whereas the bandwidth cost to support millions of streams are substantial.

In my view, this is not a serious threat to Hulu as long as they don't bring us fresher TV shows and an expanded collection of online movies. On the other hand, any competition is good for us - users - it will drive up the quality of service and bring down the number of commercials per second.

Legal Online Streaming

Just stumbled on this newer website called IReel. They promise streaming of latest release with a free registration. You get previews and some other features for free, but at the end of the day you would have to pay for movies. I know i know.. I am supposed to keep this blog strictly about finding free streams online, but read on.

I had my qualms with Amazon Unbox streaming movies, so this might be a viable competitor to try out. When I first heard that Amazon started selling streaming movies through their Unbox service I was thrilled to say the least. At the time, about three years ago, this was the only alternative to watch from your computer what you would normally have to go to Blockbuster for. So I bought in, and the first couple of times it was satisfactory, although an average movie would take 3-4 hours to download, so no real-time online streaming per se. It still required to install their proprietary player with DRM and the discounted deals ran out too.

Netflix has been trying to do the same only in combination with their traditional DVD rental program, but promises are to get streaming only video subscription service going by the end of 2009. All these services, be it Amazon or Netflix, in my opinion still suffer from a very poor selection of titles.

There is a decent comparison table of on-demand online video streaming services on wikipedia. Keep checking back as we progress to our final destination - finding a free stream online.

Watch NCAA Games Online

You can still catch NCAA Online Madness and watch all NCAA basketball games for free!. For other free sports streams online check out OVGuide/sports. YouTube has partnered with CBS and also jumped on board with the NCAA games (watch at YouYube.com/marchmadness

Soccer fans around the world have uniter into peer-to-peer networks to watch online streams of World Cup, Champions League and top premier leagues. To get connected all you need is to install a little piece of p2p software (like SOPCast). You can get fresh listings of sports broadcasts from around the world here.

Stay tuned to get your weekly free online streaming updates!

Find Free TV Shows Online

Here is the typical scenario: you just found out that Hulu doesn't carry your favorite episode of House MD. There is no stopping you, so you set on a quest to find your favorite free tv show online.

Let us explore free online streaming options that are especially good for finding TV shows.

Stage 0: First things first: maybe a TV show you are looking for is REALLY free. Check out ABC, CBS and NBC website, they do have a lot of streaming content freely available and in great quality. Note: this is the only legal way I know of to find your shows online.

Stage 1: You can start by finding TV shows through YouTube and the likes. Often times the streams don't stay there for long and are removed by the copyright owners within a few hours. No need to despair- read on to consider other steps to find free tv shows online

Stage 2: Check out a couple places that aggregate TV streams from a bunch of other sites. To start with SideReel.com is a good option for finding both tv series and movies. If you are into dark web-desings TV-Video.net has a good number of latest TV-shows appearing just as they air.

Stage 3: Finding tv through google. The streams are often name by season and episode s01e03 or s1e03. Try doing a google search with the name of the season and the episode you are trying to find. Don't forget to add the words "free stream" or "streaming". Let's pretend you are a House MD fan: try this search "house s05e12 streaming" or house s05e12 free stream. You might notice that in addition to all the streaming options you get a lot of torrent sites. BitTorrent is a good option if you are willing to wait a couple of hours, so try add house s05e12 free stream -torrent to you search query to ensure you are getting streaming options only.

A note of caution: while searching for free online streams you may notice a phrase "Google TV" flickering by here and there. It is a scam! As of now there is no such thing, but how knows...

Hope this will shine some light on the art of finding free tv shows online.

P.S. All things above are for educational purposes only... of course.

Free Stream Online: Best Places To Find One

I hope this blog will become a useful resource for all avid free online stream seekers like myself. We have an unprecedented opportunity today to get more and more of what we enjoy in watching TV for free. Moreover we can do it on our own terms: when we want and exactly how we want it. Although there are many great alternative ways to get your movies (torrents or file sharing sites) I will focus primarily on online streams. I believe their immediacy is akin to what we are used in a regular TV set. Push the button and watch your favorite program!

There are several types of free online streaming resources available. Let me start with my favorite: streaming directories or online tv guides. The best online streaming guide I am using now is ovguide.com. Yes, just like TV Guide only "online videos". It provides links to a variety of free ad-supported streams like Joox or Hulu, featuring movies, TV shows, SNL clips and many more.

In OV Guide all links are categorized by genre (Movies, Sports, News, Adult, Tech, Science, etc) in a very user friendly left-side menu. You can find a section with cartoons for kids and adults, video blogs and even free online radio shows. The very first thing you would see on their page is a list of top 10 movie searches, information on what streams people are watching now and also some editor's picks.

The best feature of OV Guide is that is provides statistics on site views. Forget the ratings! If the online stream was rated by a couple of devotees as a 5, it still gets the highest rank, but this is ... excuse my French... a non-representative sample. Usually the sites with exceptionally high ratings represent relatively new streams and are not of high quality. On the other hand, the total number of views for the streaming site is something you can count on. Especially, since the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands.

In future posts for Free Stream Online I will keep coming back to OV Guide featuring topical reviews of free streams that can be found there.

If you have any strong feelings about this page please comment with suggestions. Also let me know what kinds of video streaming are you looking for and I promise to get creative and dive much deeper into the subject of finding free streams online.