Chenopup already let the cat out of the bag in the comments to the previous entry, but in case you don’t read those, here’s a follow-up to the news about CBS.com streaming classic television episodes: NBC.com is doing the same thing with some its old shows, namely The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the original Battlestar Galactica, the disco-rific Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (mmmm, Erin Gray), Emergency!, Miami Vice, and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. (You trivia hounds may remember that Steven Spielberg’s first job was directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Night Gallery…)

This streaming video stuff is probably old news for my more tech-savvy readers, so I apologize if I’m boring you, but it’s quite a novelty to me. I imagine that if I knew where to look, I could probably find just about the entire history of television out there on the InterWebs, and that’s an awesome and humbling thought. Kids these days, growing up in the on-demand, home-video world, just take it for granted that this stuff never goes away, but for a good part of my lifetime, once a show was canceled or otherwise ended, and following a couple years of syndicated re-runs, it was gone forever. By the time I was in my teens, I was walking around with a jumble of half-remembered shows in my head that may as well have been dreams, for all I could tell. (In fact, there’s at least one old series that I honestly thought I had dreamed for a very, very long time.) Even when VCRs and videocassettes became commonplace, it was only a very small sampling of television product that ever made it onto the format. But now, between official TV-on-DVD releases and this Internet stuff, I’m on the verge of recapturing, well, pretty much everything I ever saw that left any kind of impression on me. And that simply amazes me.

Of course, there is a downside: having every film and TV show and song I ever cared about so easily accessible drains a certain amount of the joy out of them. It may not make sense, but in certain respects it was more fun to fondly remember my personal grails than to actually have them in my hand. I first experienced that peculiarly modern let-down when I realized that I no longer had to spend hours haunting thrift stores and used book shops in hopes of finding some volume I remembered from my youth; all I had to do was spend 45 seconds online and it was mine. I regret that I’ll probably never again feel that flush of adrenaline that came with spotting that one title on a dusty basement shelf, the one I’ve been on the lookout for ever since whenever. This video stuff is kind of the same way… and the feeling is only compounded when it turns out that a particular series turns out not to have aged well.

Incidentally, I much prefer the CBS.com interface over NBC’s. The CBS site is clean and intuitive, everything is easy to find, and entire series are available now. By contrast, the NBC set-up is something of a visual nightmare, and it appears that they’re releasing one episode a week, so there isn’t much of a back catalog to choose from yet. Sometimes I think standardization would be a very good thing for the Internet.