The amount of tv-shows offered at FanCast is incredible, seems to be more than 100 shows that can be selected. A quick test revealed 11 full episodes of 24, 2 Numb3rs episodes, 7 30-days episodes. The usual amount seems to be between 2-10 for most shows.

Most episodes show advertisements before playing the shows but that is fine I guess, it has to be financed somehow. Resolution is 384 x 288 and the quality of the video is good enough and far superior to those of Youtube. You do get recommendations on the right side of the video and a short description of the video that you are currently viewing.

Update: Fancast has been retired. It is no longer available and will never be available again. Users from the United States can use other – legal – services such as Hulu to watch tv shows online. Users from outside the United States, ex pats for instance, can only watch the shows online when using a virtual private network or another means of using an American IP address.

There are however several catches which really reduce the attractiveness and quality of this new video download service. The service uses DRM, works with Internet Explorer, requires a NBC Direct software to download and view the movies and requires you to have a IP from the United States.

The selection is limited at this time offering episodes from The Office, 30 Rock, Life, Bionic Woman, Friday Night Lights at this time and only the latest episode is available for download at NBC Direct. The service seems to be rather unstable at this moment because my first tries of launching the NBC Direct player ended in an offline (Storefront is offline) notice.

What’s even worse is that there is no way to try to reconnect to the service from within the player and I did not have the impression that the player tried to auto connect to it either. Closing the player and opening it again was the only solution that I could come up with.

It should also be mentioned that downloaded tv episodes will not be in your library forever. You have got two days after hitting the play button for the first time to watch the video which will become defunct after that period.

To sum it up. The pros are that the NBC Direct service is free at the moment. Cons are that it uses DRM, only works with Internet Explorer, requires a proprietary software, offers only five tv shows and only one episode of them at any given time, has connection issues and lets the users watch the tv episodes in a period of 48 hours after pressing play for the first time.

NBC should really take a look at Torrent sites to see how such a service could be created that would be successful.

Amazon and Yahoo are just two of the websites that offer premieres on their websites. As usual this content is only available to viewers of certain areas, probably only to viewers with an IP from the United States. All others rely as usual on P2P and Usenet to grab the episodes from there.

If you are from the United States you can go to Yahoo and view Aliens in America as well as Friday Night Lights until September 30th when they are replaced by Dexter, Life is Wild and Brotherhood.

Amazon is currently offering season premieres of Bones, Rules of Engagement, Til Death, House and Big Bang Theory. Amazon Unbox is only available to customers from the United States as well.

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Yahoo TV premieres
Amazon Unbox premieres

There is practically no way to watch that episode again which would really be awful because it would be hard to follow the storyline of the upcoming episode. Vid2c – and others such as Alluc or Peekvid – provide a way to watch those episodes only by creating lists of commercial videos that are available on video portals such as Youtube, Dailymotion and others.

Vid2c offers a wide variety of links in categories such as TV Shows, Movies, Celebs and Anime as well as high quality TV Show, Movie and Music Video links. Clicking on a category leads to a long list of links that are sorted alphabetically. Usually the more popular tv shows got more links and are more likely to have links to all episodes than not so popular shows.

As you can see in the image they have links to almost 19000 tv episodes, 5000 movies and 5000 music videos plus additional links to Asian movies and Anime videos. Some episodes however are divided into several parts which means that 19000 is not the absolute number of tv episodes.

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Vid2c Homepage
Alluc Homepage
Peekvid Homepage
via Digital Alchemy

Every video has the option to be played in flash or downloaded either for ipod, psp or pc. I´am not sure why they offer them for free, take it while it lasts.