Kill the cable box: Get free TV

By Melinda Fulmer

Opening a hefty cable or satellite-dish bill each month can make you feel like a sucker, especially if much of what you watch can be had for free.

With the average cable bill hovering around $100, many strapped consumers have pulled the plug.

How can you watch your favorite television shows and movies without paying a dime?

Here's our guide to the best online and offline ways to get your entertainment fix.

TV without paying for it

The end of the rabbit ears era: Time was, you could get your local television channels for free on your old analog set with the help of a simple set-top antenna (real or improvised).

Since the transition to digital television in June, though, a digital converter box is required to get the signal.

But this works only for local programming. If you want Lifetime's "Project Runway," for example, or if you want shows from weeks or months past, you're going to have to look on the Web.

Turn your computer into a TV: Your computer is a gold mine for television shows past and present. You can stream or download episodes from many sites and watch them on your computer. If you don't want to sit at your desk, you can transfer the shows to your bigger television screen by plugging in audio and video cables, using an HDMI connector or using a wireless media player. More on that here:

• How to watch TV on a computer

• Watch your media anywhere

You can stream your favorite CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox shows in their entirety at the networks' Web sites. These networks have found that making episodes available online doesn't diminish their broadcast audiences, says Kurt Scherf, a technology analyst with Parks & Associates.

Most are of good video quality, but they do contain ads, and the number of episodes you can watch can vary widely.

Cable channels also often provide extensive material online. A quick check of your favorite channel's Web site likely can provide plenty of online viewing.

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, and Veoh are also good places to watch television from years past, as well as a handful of episodes from current shows. Miro 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 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 Dailymotion 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 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.

Continued: Waste of time

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