Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

We’re back with another helpful post on how to find the best in online video. Last time, we covered Joost, Hulu, and Sling.  This time, we’re talking about the individual networks.  While it may be more work to go to different sites, you will get better quality video and that’s worth the trouble of typing in a few URLs.  Also find out which sites to avoid.

The Good

First up is Fox.com.  Their content is available on Hulu, but higher resolution video is available on Fox’s website.  If you go to fox.com/fod you’ll see better resolution videos with usually smaller ad breaks.  Fox claims that the video is HD.  The quality is definitely better than Hulu, but not as good as an old fashioned over the air connection for television reception. 

CBS.com also has a good selection of HD video.  Usually, you have to sit through some kind of Intel ad before watching very good quality video.  Hulu doesn’t cover CBS, although Joost and Sling do.  The standard definition videos are of the same quality, but if you want to watch the Late Show with David Letterman in HD, CBS is the place to go. 

ABC’s video player is quite good but has the annoying distinction of requiring the user to click an area of the window to continue the video.  This is probably quite good for their metrics, but irritates the user.  However the video quality is second to none.  A lot of the video claims to be in HD, and if your connection is good enough, you may not notice that much of a difference between the ABC.com player and ABC on your TV.  Now that Hulu will have ABC content, I still expect ABC.com to feature higher quality video.

TheWB.com has a bunch of shows in very good quality, but suffers from a limited selection.  You can find gems of television shows like “Veronica Mars,” “Pushing Daisies,” and “Chuck” on TheWB.com.  They also have original shows, but I have yet to watch them.  You can create playlists rather simply by clicking the “+add to playlist” button. 

The In-Between

NBC is a partner in Hulu.  Hulu has a great video player.  However, NBC has one of the most irritating video players out there.  You can get two minute recaps of videos at NBC which is nice if you just want to catch up on a show.  Full episode players show a large ad on the bottom of the screen through out the presentation.  If you’re running Windows and you don’t mind running NBC’s NBC Direct, you can download HD versions of many programs. 

You can’t move these videos to a portable player, but the higher quality video may be worth it to you.  Unfortunately, the NBC Direct player also has a big fat ad on it.  NBC’s annoying player can also be found on sister networks like USA.  I haven’t had the chance to check out every NBC Universal property, but I would imagine they are similarly annoying.

The Bad

CWtv.com has a lack of 16:9 and HD videos together with long ad breaks.  Shows that are normally presented in the 16:9 format for television are both pillarboxed and letterboxed.  If you like watching videos with a large black border, not using the full potential of your display, then you’ll love CWtv.com. 

I don’t know who watches MyNetworkTV besides me (I like their magic specials), but their online presence is abysmal.  The videos have a “fullscreen” button, but apparently it means just a larger video in the same window.  Not cool.