Saturday, February 20, 2010

My Fall from Grace to Watch TV Online

Over the years, I've been trying my best to recover from TV addiction, and by the end of 2009, it's been limited to watching Lost, Supernatural (my wife's colleague turned us on to this by lending us first 4 seasons on DVD, to which we happily traded whatever sleeping hours we had left on any given night), Tivo (Craig Ferguson and Charlie Rose mostly), then the occasional sports (NFL and NBA), then the occasional Netflix "watch instantly" movies.

While that may sound like a grand accomplishment (at least to me), you have to understand that I haven't fully recovered from my addiction.

This was made painfully clear earlier this month when during the same week that I left for Nepal, both Lost and Supernatural started airing new episodes, and I would miss Super Bowl as well. Still, I figured since we have "broadband" (ahem, 512kbps) in Nepal, I'd be able to catch a lot of it on the web. So, my first weekend in Nepal, I go to NBC site to watch Lost - and I get this warning - "You appear to be accessing from outside of United States, f&#( off!". Same with Supernatural. (Superbowl I didn't even attempt to because it was 5 am in the morning in Nepal when the game started, and when I talked to my kids on Skype later that morning, my 6-year son very happily let me know who'd won)

I then tried hulu - it basically told me to buzz off for the same reasons when I looked for Lost or Supernatural. Tried Netflix to see if I can watch instantly - they don't allow access from outside the US either. Hence came my fall from grace - I searched for bittorrent feeds for the shows, and whoala, I had all 3 episodes of Lost and Supernatural downloaded overnight, and the next night around 10 pm, I was all content to start my marathon session of watching all missed Lost episodes, and Supernatural the next night, and I became complete again.

Anyone know if there's a way to access my Tivo'd shows online? I installed the Tivo Desktop thing (even the paid version), but haven't found any easy obvious way to access my transferred shows over the web.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Try Slingbox! I don't use it myself, but saw something that might solve your problem when I was looking at their latest Blackberry software a couple of weeks ago. You might be interested in their mobile apps yourself. +R

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