Tags: Software   TV


Who can be bothered to watch TV shows at their scheduled times anymore? A show better be frickin’ amazing for it to make me sit in front of the TV at a certain day and time, and for me to suffer through 18 minutes of irritating commercials that interrupt the fun. Only Lost has been addictive enough for me to routinely park my butt on the couch every Wednesday night at eight o’clock.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t other shows that I want to watch. I just prefer other kinds of entertainment that I can turn on and off when I want them. I grew up playing video games, which you can jump into when you feel like it, and turn off when you’ve had enough. Books also wait patiently for audiences to enjoy them. Television’s format is just inconvenient and annoying for those of us that have become accustomed to “on demand” mediums of entertainment.

I recently found a program called TVShows for the Mac that lets me watch shows when I’m ready to watch them. Yes, I know that you can download shows from BitTorrent sites, but that means that for every episode I want to watch, I need to search for the correct video file and download it myself every week, or every day for daily shows. Forget it. Sounds like something that can be automated... which is what TVShows does.

TVShows lets you subscribe to the shows that you want to watch. It will automatically find the torrents for those programs and use your default BitTorrent client to download them in the background. Without any effort on your part, your shows will arrive on your computer. As a bonus, the shows are commercial free! So far, I have been very happy with the video quality of the shows I've been downloading. Since everyone who has subscribed to a show will start downloading at roughly the same time, the speed of the torrent download can be extremely fast. But if you insist on watching shows the same day that they air, you might be disappointed. For less popular shows, it can take a day before the download completes. Still, once you break free of the TV schedule, you may not care about watching shows a day or two later than you used to.

Just let the shows get downloaded to your computer, and when you’ve had your fill of video games, if that should ever happen, you can see how many shows you’ve got waiting for you. It’s nice to have a week’s worth of Colbert Report waiting for me on the weekend. I’m often not interested in his guests, so I can skip the interviews, reducing the length of each episode to around 15 minutes. That’s a lot of time saved that can be better spent on games, books, blogging, and even going outside! (Probably in that order.)

I have been watching On The Lot this way, and can’t imagine watching it the old-fashioned way. Like other reality shows, the show tries to cause suspense by pausing and filling time with biographies of the contestants and other stuff I can’t bear watching. I can watch an episode of On The Lot in about 25 minutes now. No longer do I have to suffer mean-spirited tricks like when the host says, “The person who is going home this week is... coming up right after this!” When commercials are intentionally inserted into the middle of a sentence, I don’t feel bad downloading commercial-free versions of the show.

If you’ve got a TiVo or other PVR, then you already know how nice it is to watch TV this way. But with TVShow, you don’t need a cable TV subscription, and you're not limited by geography. Want to watch a British show that hasn't made it to your country yet ? Subscribe to it in TVShows! Once you’ve got a way to deliver those downloaded shows to your TV, then you’ve got it made. Television networks had better start adapting fast before this trend takes off. Crying foul and calling people thieves won’t be good enough.