EVEN though I usually don?t have the time, I have to admit that I?m a couch potato at heart. Give me a good TV show?CSI, House, Dexter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, to name just a few?and I?ll happily drop what I?m doing and vegetate.

Unfortunately, I?m almost never home in time to catch these shows when they air on cable, and I don?t own a TiVo. In theory, the Internet would be the perfect solution to my scheduling problems. Just watch the episodes online when I?m free. The problem is, Internet TV has largely been an unfulfilled promise, especially if you?re not a US resident.

There are generally two legal avenues to watch TV online. One way is to find Web sites like YouTube that stream video onto your browser. Another way is to use a stand-alone player that connects to the Internet to download or stream the videos to your computer.

On the Web, Hulu carries the most popular American TV shows from NBC and Fox, but will not stream its content to Internet users outside the United States. The Web site?s assurances that it is working hard to make its videos available to the rest of the world ring hollow?they have been flashing the same message for more than a year.

Fancast.com also has a decent collection of full TV shows, but when I tried to watch a recent episode of CSI, all it gave me was the voice message: ?This content is currently unavailable.? Further investigation shows that Fancast.com, too, is an American-only site.

Another geographically crippled site is the BBC, which will not stream its TV shows outside the UK.

Joost, a joint venture between the founders of Skype and Kazaa, offers a much smaller selection of shows and also blocks some of its content.

There are workarounds to this kind of geographical IP blocking?the most popular of which is to install Hotspot Shield before visiting these video sites?but doing this seems more trouble than it?s worth, so I looked for other options.

Miro, the free and open source Internet TV player that works on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, is great for recording and watching online content, enabling you to download entire clips or shows before playing them to eliminate the starts and stops of streaming video. You can even subscribe to Internet shows or video blogs and download them automatically when new episodes become available. Sadly Miro doesn?t do very well with finding and downloading commercial TV shows.

Another promising avenue was Boxee, a media center for your movies, TV shows, music and photos as well as streaming content from Web sites such as Neflix, CBS, Comedy Central and Last.fm. The program, still in alpha testing, works initially on Linux and OS X and seemed a bit buggy when I tested it on Ubuntu. What?s more, because it simply streams content from existing sites like Hulu, Boxee is also geographically challenged.

In my continuing search for a serviceable source for TV shows online, I stumbled upon CastTV (www.casttiv.com), a specialized search engine for online videos, from TV shows to movies, celebrity, news, sports and viral videos. CastTV searches all the popular video sites, incuding YouTube, iTunes, Hulu and Megavideo.com.

Although CastTV will not get around geographical blocking (you still can?t watch Hulu), it will give you alternative sites?if there are any?where you can get the same show. For instance, I was finally able to watch a complete episode of House, by choosing to stream it from Megavideo.com instead of Hulu. I could have gone straight to Megavideo.com and searched from there, but CastTV makes it much easier, and gives me a choice on the source of the video stream.

As it turns out, CastTV is also an excellent place to go to find live video. This came in handy this week when I wanted to monitor the Oscars online. A search on CastTV quickly gave me seven sites that were streaming the award ceremonies live, including Web sites in the UK, Germany and Chile. This enabled me to try each site to see which one gave the best performance.

The search for my one online entertainment hub continues, but for now, the award goes to... CastTV, which let me watch Slumdog Millionaire run away with this year?s Oscars?while I was trying to finish this column.

Column archives and blog at: http://www.chinwong.com