Adult Swim

It appears that Adult Swim has full episodes posted on its website. The episodes are split into multiple clips and played using a Flash player similar to Youtube.

I'm a big fan of the series The Boondocks. It has the best detailed drawing of any current cartoon and the anime-style animation is great for action sequences. I own season one on DVD but season two is still coming out. I missed a new episode, "Stinkmeaner Strikes Back", and found it useful that I could watch them from the website. The problem with this was that it was faster to download the entire episode off bittorrent than to cache the Flash version over my lame connection. The torrent I downloaded was obviously a rip of the clips provided by Adult Swim that somebody had captured and then spliced together.

Eventually television networks are going to need to compete with bittorrent. If I could view the entire episode at one time and it loaded decently fast I would be tempted to save some harddrive space and simply watch it off of the website. But what happens when you try to watch it over a slow connection like mine? Even if it isn't that slow, trying to cache it over a wifi connection that drops a random amount of packets takes forever. With bittorrent you only need to download it once and can replay it as many times as you want. The tricky part would be placing advertisements in the videos. If the advertisements are placed between segments of the show then people will simply remove them. If they tried to place them on top of the episode it would annoy fans really quickly. I can't stand the flashing banners that FX displays during its movies, even if it only covers part of the screen. The [adultswim.com] logo being at the bottom of the screen is much less obtrusive.

Mininova is apparently working with some company named Red Band to distribute a show entitled Pariah Island. More here. It should be interesting to see what they come up with.