The Perils of No TV

I don't have a TV. I don't really miss it, other than for watching Doctor Who in full-on surround with a HOOOOJ screen.

It does mean I have to wait for a couple of days to see most of the interesting TV shows to turn up on Hulu. Some I don't get to see at all. But generally I could, often by going to the network's site for the show and catching up on stuff there.

It oh-so nearly works almost all the time.

I have had "Better Off Ted" recommended to me; it's on ABC, and is apparently something I will find funny. Since I don't mind watching ads in between American TV shows, I stroll over to ABC.com and click to see the latest show. Good! I'm only 3 eps into the season, the sample seems to play fine and shows every indication that I will enjoy the full show.

So I click. It tells me I need to install a plugin.
...
....
ok. Sure. It's a site I should be able to trust and it's going to slot into Firefox, which means I can remove it whenever I want.

It installs, I accept the usual license agreement, it shows me an advert and then errors out saying it couldn't find a decent video renderer.

Of course, it renders the ad perfectly.

It allows me to continue anyway, indicating that there really isn't a problem, and then asks me to decide between Standard and Streaming HD. Well, bearing in mind the load on the apartment complex wifi I go for standard. It buffers. For ten minutes.

While I'm waiting I have a look at Twitter (Neil Gaiman has pictures of sticks. See what you miss if you're not on Twitter?), check my mail, fire up the USEnet client and, just for fun, see if I can find Better Off Ted. Ahhhh, alt.binaries.tv has all three episodes in HD. A mere 200mb each file, too. Well, that'll take me all of about...15 minutes to download and reassemble. Half hour to watch, just in time for bed.

Moral dilemma: I don't want to condone piracy. On the other hand, I'm going to watch the pilot, ad free, and then I'm going to delete it. No, I'll just check back with the ABC movie viewer...it's exactly where I left it. Still buffering. In the same spot.

OK, a race. USEnet vs ABC.com
I leave the ABC.com viewer where it is, because that's a 30% head start, and pull the .rar files from USEnet. And, like Clarkson driving the Veyron, suddenly I'm in the grip of POWER!

It's ten minutes later. The ripped version is down, watchable and ready to go. The official, ethical version is stuck.

Odd, how people make it harder to be good than they do to be bad, isn't it?


Update: In the end, I decided to bin the downloaded file and make the ABC thing work. Tomorrow, though. Maybe. I know they're looking at TV shows watched online as part of the ratings and I would really like to see this show - but I have run out of time to watch anything fun tonight.