So much for watching TV

In an effort to increase viewership and support those good ol' American TV shows in their time of need, I tried figuring out how to watch TV shows while overseas. But it didn't work.

These days the networks have created various websites such as hulu.com, nbc.com, and abc.com to name a few. The silly part is that in this now global economy they've decided to horde this precious commodity and prevent Americans overseas, who may want to watch the shows nobody in the States want to watch, from watching. So since I can't directly go to them and watch them these are the options I came across:

Hotspot Shield
This program is essentially a proxy that allows people to surf anonymously. One of the side benefits is that it masks where I would be and makes it look like I'm surfing from the US and hence able to reach the video websites mentioned above. The downside is that there's a banner ad on each page and, more importantly, a 3 gb limit per rolling 30-days (I think). There are articles that help you evade such a limit. But as you can tell from the instructions it's much too complicated to bother.

Vidalia
Vidalia is a GUI-interface for the Tor project which is a collective effort to defend against network survillance. This is done by allowing your internet traffic to be passed through a variety of computers including some in the US. You can configure the software by specifiying that you only want to connect through certain US computers and then access the above websites which would seemingly believe you are again in the US. But since there are a limited number of US computer and if everybody was to do this, it would slow down the network so that videos would be unwatchable. Which is what happened yesterday when I tried it. So, so much for that idea.

Torrents
I could always just bittorrent from the various websites that offer television shows. The downside is that the files are quite big and a hassle to download. Then again, the reason why this is so popular is that many people overseas have to resort to this. The plus side is that you get this without any commercials since the people who have done this have helpfully edited the videos to be as small as possible. Alas, the legality of this is a bit fuzzy (seeing how they are pulling from free tv...).

iTunes ($$)
Lastly, one option might be to resort to iTunes to download television shows to watch either on the laptop or on an iPod/iPhone. The downside is that it costs $1.99 per episode or $2.99 per HD episode. Doesn't sound bad until you realize that even with a Season Pass of $64.99 for Heroes Season 3 as an example, this is quite more expensive than getting the set on DVD at Costco which comes with more features (behind-the-scenes, commentary, and even subtitles) than what you would get from iTunes. I guess you can try and go with Apple's Free TV Shows iTunes Playlist, but the list is quite paltry and most likely won't be any shows that anyboy watches which is why they'd have to give them away.

That said, since nobody watches these shows in the US anyway, why bother right? Guess I'll fire up the television here and see if there's anything worth watching (or what will be imported into the US in about five years time like cell phones and cars... =)