We all love to sit down, relax and get involved in our favorite television show, but sometimes our hectic lives don’t allow us the luxury. Other times, you hear about a new television show that your local cable provider doesn’t provide, or doesn’t run at a reasonable hour. Usually you have to wait and hope your show is popular enough to make it to dvd.

There are alternatives. Many tv shows now have episodes available online to download. You can download an episode or entire season. You can even do batch downloads of episodes if you would like. We have broken down the ways you can download episodes into three categories: support service providers, full service providers, and newsgroups.

What is a Full Service Provider?

A Full Service Provider has its own network and will use copyright technologies to protect the content available on it’s network. Full Service Providers provide a safe efficient medium to download content, but usually the services are restricted for specific countries. A benefit of Full Service Providers is that they provide multiple billing methods and file formats for each item you download; depending on how you want to use the video. These services are competitive when you are looking for quality movies, and music, but their television episode selection is often poor at best.

What is a Support Service Provider?

A Support Service Provider is your grass roots provider. These are the providers that a Full Service Provider is trying to replace. A support service provider makes it easier for you to access multiple online content sources through one method, improve the access speed to those sources, and provide services to protect you from malicious content that can potentially be downloaded from the net. A support service provider shows you access to worldwide content networks and user bases, which dramatically improves the chances of you finding and downloading those rare and recent television episodes you desire.

Newsgroups

Newsgroups are one the older methods of sharing information online. Newsgroups are part of a distributed discussion system called UseNet (USEr NETwork) which was established around 1980. You don’t hear too much about newsgroups as a form of downloading because they have never been easy to use. A newsgroup functions similar to an email/bulletin board system. When you are looking to download a file that is being shared, you may have to setup 20 downloads to be pieced together and sometimes you don’t get all the pieces. While newsgroup have never been for the faint of heart, recent changes in client software has made it easier to find, access, and retrieve what you are trying to find.

Whether you’re looking for an episode that aired in another country last night, or if you just forgot to hit record, we have reviewed all the types of providers for you, which will dramatically improve your chances of finding the episode you need.

Support Providers

Name	Membership Type	Price	OS
Butterfly	Unlimited	$39.95
Full TV Downloads	Unlimited	$34.95
Shared Movies	Unlimited	$34.95
NetMovieDownloads	Unlimited	$34.95
Cinema Download	Unlimited	$39.95

Newsgroup Providers

This is the best UseNet service out there. It’s super fast, anonymous and you get a 14-day free trial allowing you to download up to 150 gigabytes. That really is awesome. There are more pricing options, we have just listed the least expensive option. The service information is also available in multiple languages.

Name	Usage/Month	Price/Month	OS
UseNeXT	10 GB	$11.28

Full Service Providers