5 Reasons to Ditch Your Cable Box or Satellite Dish

3. Blinkx Broadband Television

Blinkx Broadband TV's content is easily a notch above what you'll find on many cable and satellite stations. Because it uses the Blinkx video search engine to pull content from all over the Web, BBTV offers features, dramas, short films, and comedy sketches you typically might find only on PBS or the Independent Film Channel, if you found them at all. (BBTV also has an adult section that's definitely NSFW.) It didn't have a ton of video available at press time, but what it does offer is generally pretty good. And though BBTV is designed to be ad supported, I didn't see a single commercial in my hours of free viewing.

That's the good news. The bad news is, unlike Joost or Vuze, BBTV's interface looks less like a cable channel guide and more like one designed for a computer. Its menu is organized into six broad categories (such as entertainment, news and info, and sports) with subcategories (animation, comedy, etc.), and then multiple channels within each. Strangely for a service built around a video search engine, there's no way to search for content inside BBTV.

The stand-alone video player is also clearly a work in progress. It crashed or stuttered several times while I was testing it (your mileage may vary), and video quality was only so-so. The Transcription feature, which uses speech recognition to translate audio into text that displays alongside the video, didn't work for most videos--and when it did work, it was laughably bad.

Launched in April, BBTV has some kinks to work out. Despite that, you may find yourself wasting hours watching it when you really should be working.

4. Babelgum

Babelgum is really a social network built around video--like YouTube, but without the grainy videos, copyright violations, or annoying Webcam confessionals. Babelgum's 64 channels include PBS, Paranormal TV, and the Drive-In Movie Channel, but most of the content consists of nonfiction news clips, documentaries, and short independent films with a distinctly international flavor.

Still, it's the social aspect that sets this video service apart. You can rate videos, tag them, create your own page of favorites, embed them in your blog, or add them to your Facebook profile. You can join communities centered on, say, old cartoons or motorcycles, and then exchange comments on screen with other community members. And of course you can search for content by tags that other Babelgummers have attached to each clip.

The coolest feature: You can create "smart channels" that aggregate clips based on search terms, with pleasingly random results. For example, my search for "maxim" created a channel featuring Maxim magazine models, old commercials for Maxim Instant Coffee, and a vintage clip of Maxim Litvinoff, Stalin's commissar for foreign affairs.

Still in beta at press time, Babelgum seems to have only a few thousand users (one of whom is Spike Lee, who chaired the recently completed Babelgum Film Festival in Cannes). Be the first on your block to watch it.

5. Veoh

If you had to sum up Veoh's philosophy, it might be that a mind is a wonderful thing to waste. The service easily offers the widest selection of mainstream content, pulling from Google, Hulu, Yahoo, and YouTube video searches, as well as nearly every other well-known online source. You'll find movies such as Alien or The Usual Suspects, episodes of older TV shows like Adam 12 and Firefly, and a wide range of Web-only content (including some adult-oriented material). You can search shows by tag or title. Like TiVo, Veoh can offer recommendations based on videos you've watched.

Veoh also lets you build your own Veoh portal mixing video with Flickr photos, news headlines, Web-based e-mail, Amazon searches, Craigslist ads, weather reports, and other RSS-fueled widgets.

The downside? You must deal with the limitations of each source, such as unskippable commercials, grainy videos that are hard to watch in large sizes, and "shows" that are actually just clips instead of entire episodes. Another problem: If you play a clip from Hulu and click anywhere on the screen, that automatically sends your browser to Hulu.com--which gets annoying fast.

If you believe 500 channels simply aren't enough, Veoh will give you plenty of new ways to waste your brain.

Contributing Editor Dan Tynan wastes his brain daily on his blog, Tynan on Technology.