In the 22 years since News Corp created the Fox network with the intention of competing with the Big Three, it has unarguably expanded the field to a Big Four and has recently risen to throne of the highest-rated network on television. How does their online presence stack up, and what can you get out of it?

Fox.com is like a solid sedan with all the features and very little in the way of bells and whistles. If you just want the basics, like watching your favorite shows online, talking about them on forums, or checking the Fox schedule, you're in luck. Fox has official sites for 25 currently running shows, 22 of which feature free full episodes, and also has sites for four shows that are coming soon.

Each show's site is styled to fit the series, but the features of each are quite standard. While some shows have some nifty extras on their pages, the sites typically have all of the following:

• a brief "about" or "info" page,
• a few character bios,
• a "features" or "downloads" section with buddy icons and wallpaper,
• a bit of mobile content,
• a gallery of photos,
• episode guides/recaps,
• a community section or just a forum/message board, and
• videos, including full episodes

Fox.com's video player is a slightly less snazzy version of the player that News Corp and NBC Universal have on Hulu. It's the same size player, and has almost all of the same features: you can share episodes and clips by embedding the player on other websites, you can "dim the lights" (darkening the rest of the page to make the video stand out more), or watch in full-screen mode.

Fox has experimented with a couple of new-media efforts like blogs and podcasting. A wide variety of podcasts were all ended by the end of last summer, but several shows still have their own blogs.

A more general blog, Future on Fox, was created to promote upcoming series, including shows that hadn't even been picked up, but now it also occasionally promotes existing primetime Fox shows. It occasionally employs original videos and behind-the-scenes info to promote them, and it also features an impressive set of links to fan-created websites about two of their new series, Fringe and Dollhouse, in the blogroll.

And of course, there's some divergence between how involved the viewer communities are. Fox's biggest hit, American Idol, was a huge driver of SMS (text messaging) in the US, and they maintain the MyIdol community of over 1.1 million members who have written nearly 190,000 blog posts. Other shows maintain wikis, have official groups in outside social networks like MySpace and Facebook, or stick with a simple forum.

Fox.com has thoroughly covered all the standard content that the average viewer will be interested in getting from a TV network site, for all of their shows, not just the most popular. Though Fox has fewer series than the other broadcast networks due to a shorter prime-time schedule, providing full episodes for almost all of their series is nothing to sneeze at. So while we might be charmed by more ambitious attempts to integrate the internet and TV, knowing that we can get quality, safe content online for all our favorite shows from Fox is quite nice, too. Enjoy.

Following news that digital sales of music in the US were leading overall growth in the industry in 2008, it turns out that digital sales are booming in the UK as well, with sales of legal music downloads up 33% over 2007. Digital album sales also soared in 2008.

And there's icing on the cake in the UK too: high street retailers are also seeing growth in music sales, meaning that there's room--and demand--in the UK market for a range of content types.

That's good news for the music industry and good news for consumers.

A new study by Cisco shows that even though online video tends to evoke the image of user-uploaded content--think dancing dogs on YouTube--it's professionally produced video like television programming, feature films, or online video extras that make up the bulk of what web users are watching.  According to Cisco, Americans spend 2.5 times longer watching professional content than they spend watching user-created content.

NewTeeVee thinks that the difference is due in part to the emergence of Hulu and other legal resources for watching online video. Legal, full-length professional video is still relatively new, so presumably the amount of time people spend watching featured content online will grow even more in the future.  The more legal, professionally-produced content there is available online, the more consumers will watch.

And, as NewTeeVee suggests, if electronics makers can push more consumers to adopt Internet-enabled set top boxes that can display online video on a TV, that could drive both the demand for and supply of professionally produced titles available online.

Comedy Central, the cable network launched to popularity by South Park and cemented by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is a part of MTV Networks Entertainment Group, and given how polished MTV.com is, one might expect ComedyCentral.com to be a solid operation. Let's take a look.

As you can see, the layout is simple, so it's not hard to find what interests you. As with most TV network websites, each show has its own page - but in Comedy Central's case, several of the shows' sites are hosted outside the main website, at their own URLs.

Comedy Central doesn't have a whole lot of original shows, but for the shows that have been anchors of the channel's popularity - South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report - they have an embarrassment of riches online.

The website for South Park, a show the network would like to keep running forever, has every single episode of all 12 seasons of the show streaming online, supported by just a few ads per episode - and half of those are parody ads created by the makers of South Park. And once you see that they have gobs of bonus content, you realize that it really is everything a TV show's website should be.

And they don't skimp on content for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the network's signature parodies of news and political talk shows. The pages for both have full episodes going back several weeks (not bad for shows that air Monday through Thursday), and an astonishing number of embeddable video clips. The Daily Show has well over 10000 videos (including more than 400 videos of guest interviews) going all the way back to January 1999, when Jon Stewart took over as host. The Colbert Report, a spin-off of The Daily Show, has built a library of over 3000 videos since its first episode in October '05, including several hundred interviews, with recurring segments and topics conveniently categorized.

Based on the recurring special political coverage starting with "Indecision 2000", election and other political content from both shows contributes to an Indecision 2008 website (which is proceeding apace into 2009) that includes its own blog.

Comedy Central's less popular original programs, like Reno 911 and The Sarah Silverman Program, have decidedly less content available online, and unsurprisingly, their syndicated shows such as Futurama and Scrubs have even less.

Comedy Central isn't all about regular programming, of course: through their Jokes.com portal, they've gone above and beyond by keeping an archive of almost 1200 stand-up comedians, each complete with a profile, short video clips and transcribed jokes for your amusement. They even have it all tagged by topic, so if you really want to watch bits about, say, marriage, you're in luck: you have hundreds of videos on the subject to keep you busy.

So Comedy Central has been... selectively thorough about pushing its cable shows across the content divide separating TV and PC. But they're apparently attempting to bridge the divide from the other direction as well: they recently entered a partnership with Atom.com, a comedy video website that produces some original content, to bring their goods to a late-night televised show.

All told, ComedyCentral.com may not be quite as impressive as its cousin MTV.com, but they've done an admirable job getting their best content online. It's a testament to the job they've done that if you're looking for a particular kind of laugh, you won't have trouble finding it.

Our friend (and occasional foe!), Larry Lessig, was on The Colbert Report last night.   Lessig and Arts+Labs member Viacom both give us permission to share this video, so...