I’m still a little confused by the new Fancast online service–free online tv?? It was developed by Comcast and is still in beta test. A combination of Joost, Hulu, IMDb, and more, Fancast looks to be emerging as a one-stop place for entertainment needs. The goal of Fancast is to deliver to the user a method to obtain the television or movie they want to see. It might be available to view online for free, and if not, they will find it for you: on cable television, at the movies, rentable from Netflix or Blockbuster, etc. It seems a pretty slick way to gain loyalty for their other products.

My favorite part of the site is the section on free television show episodes. There is a very large list to look through. I believe that part of the deal here is offering a few random episodes to “preview” to hook you in so you then need to use their cable service to see the new episodes. However, some older shows, Star Trek, Lost in Space, MacGyver, and others, have several episodes available, possibly even full seasons. I did notice that these episodes have expiration dates, I wonder if content may be swapped with other episodes of the same series or just removed.

Much of the information when looking at any of these shows is clickable: actor, producer, etc. You get information on other shows they have been in, movies, biographical sketches, and pictures. This is the IMDb part.

Shows are tagged with keywords so if you aren’t sure what you want to watch, you can plug in some descriptive keywords and see what happens. It is kind of interesting to look at the tag cloud. MacGyver, for example, has TV Series, Color, Rousing, Tense, Slick, and Adventure as some of its top tags.

Fancast will also recommend shows to you based on your set preferences and ratings you give to shows. Recommendations are also given for similar shows in a sidebar to the one you are viewing. You can also view TV listings for systems outside of Comcast, it does not discriminate.

All in all, it seems like an interesting, though developing service. I can say that I have definitely watched my share of off-air TV shows over the past few weeks. Stay tuned for more developments and features.