Documentaries off the internet

Earlier in the year I spent some time with an Australian woman who seemed to me to be at the "cutting edge" of modern approaches to media. She owned no cds, DVDs, etc and took everything she wanted off the internet to watch on her laptop (or via her flat screen tv at home). While in Spain, we watched "Juno" and "300" this way - the latter looking very odd on a tiny screen.

Back home I have been having a look at what interesting stuff is easily available. I was particularly keen on finding one or two documentary series that I remember from my youth but which I haven't seen for years. I have one or two episodes of some of them on video - but Fiona had convinced me that the modern way would be to download them all and have them on the laptop. So in the past week I have located Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", Clarke's "Civilisation", Hughes's "The Shock of the New" and "The World at War". These are big downloads and as I write this now, the last of these has been running for 10 days and is 90% done.

So far I have only watched one episode of any of these - the Kepler episode from Cosmos - but I am hugely excited about seeing the others eventually. These were all series of exceptional quality.

I have noticed that I am more focused on more academic subjects, presumably as a result of doing my prep work for the MSc. So far I haven't managed to persuade Linda to watch any of these shows with me - she reckons they are perfect ones for when she is out on the evening working. That could well be right, but it would be nice to see some together.