WEB TV has turned us into stiff-necked and bleary-eyed “mouse potatoes,” the online generation’s answer to the couch potato. For these Google-savvy tube addicts, whose brains are plugged into their laptops via fibre-optic umbilical cord, the thought of missing next week’s “Gossip Girl: The Magnificent Archibalds” episode is no longer the end of the world.

For those who lack the patience—or the necessary know-how—to sift through Torrents and P2P (Peer to Peer) networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella (using oh-so-search-friendly apps like Limewire and Xtorrent), free video streaming sites offer a quick fix—and an instant alternative.

With streaming videos, you no longer have to sift through download traffic, queue in line, and wait for days—only to discover that your long-awaited .AVI file of “90210” or “Battlestar Gallactica” is corrupted.

Video streaming sites are omnipresent these days. They basically aggregate, organize, or host great-looking online video content of all types, from TV shows and full-length movies, to music videos and animated shorts.

Best of all, they closely approximate the TV experience by offering control over player size (take your pick: HD, full-screen, or mini-player screen!). The resolution of the streamed video may vary dramatically per site. But most of them employ so-called “adaptive streaming techniques” to adjust bit rate and resolution to the your computer’s system capabilities and bandwidth.

“Television entertainment has busted out of the television and onto computer screens everywhere,” PC World magazine recently noted. “Think of it as the rebirth of television, delivered via a new, interactive medium that gives viewers more choice over what they watch—and when, where, and how they watch it.”

Here are Super’s top-rated (and top-secret) video sites to stream the TV shows you can’t get enough of.

Ninja Video
www.ninjavideo.net

Currently the hottest site for streaming TV shows and new movie releases. But it does have its occasional bugs. NinjaVideo.net offers high-def embedded videos in their excellent and easily downloadable DivX Web Player. By clicking on the NinjaVideo Helper Applet, you’ll be able to instantly buffer any video and stream it in real time. They have over 10,000 videos on the main site and a very active forum dedicated to Movie and TV discussion.

Surf the Channel
www.surfthechannel.com

Launched in October 2007 with the aim of indexing “all videos, everywhere” and listing them in easy to navigate pages, Surf the Channel aggregates videos from all over the Web—including sites like YouTube, Hulu, and other obscure sites—and makes all the videos available through a simple, searchable interface. The selection is huge and slightly overwhelming, but if you can sift through the dizzying lists, you’ll find what you need in no time.

Alluc
www.alluc.org

Interestingly, Alluc.org (pronounced “all you see”) started out as a quest to collect all “Family Guy” episodes hosted on popular video hosting websites and to categorize them in one place. Alluc.org is essentially a link-sharing website that catalogues links to TV shows, movies, and music videos. Unlike Ninja Video, they don’t host their own content or have download options. They’re more like a grand database of free streaming video sharing websites similar to Hulu or OVGuide.