If you miss your favorite show tonight, watch the episode online later.

Online TV is the new wave for TV shows — and it’s booming. Catch shows online at your own convenience, plus, with shorter commercials.

And with premiere week beginning today — which officially kicks off the fall TV season —it is easier to watch any show even if you miss the first episode.

Recent shows are just the tip of the iceberg of shows available online. Want to watch the Walsh family? “Beverly Hills 90210” is on cbs.com. How about Alfred Hitchcock stories or detectives Tubbs and Crockett? “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Miami Vice” are on Hulu.

NBC and Fox teamed up and created hulu.com, while CBS and ABC paired together to place their shows on veoh.com.

The big networks aren’t the only ones getting in on the online craze. Their parent companies are splurging other content there as well. Veoh offers content from MTV Networks, ESPN and Showtime. Find programs on Hulu from NBC, Sci Fi, Fox, FX, Bravo and the 20th Century Fox Television and Universal TV libraries.

Beware — not every show is online. Shows such as “Boston Legal” are not offered and only shortened versions of “Law & Order” and its spinoffs are available.

But online TV still needs some work. Some operators, most notoriously sports-cable channel ESPN, limits access to its site by distributors, but the content is still free.

You can still go to the direct network and watch their programs. And, more than likely, you can find more content directly aimed at your interest of the show. Nbc.com has a load of “Office” features such as character blogs and a “mini putt” game. Meanwhile, “Saturday Night Live” is having its own presidential race between political characters the show’s performers created.

Cbs.com has the feature “Live on Letterman,” featuring clips of his recent musical guests. Letterman’s monologues and recent Top 10 lists are also included on the site.

Cable TV is another place with a plethora of content focused on the TV fan. For fans of USA’s “Psych,” the show’s Web site offers everything from games and cartoon shorts, to blogs and writer commentaries, and of course, full episodes.

ABC Family offers blogs, webisodes — online-only shorts — and favorite moments for most of its shows like “Wildfire” and “Greek.”

Some online TV has fallbacks. The popular ESPN 360 is free, as long as your Internet service provider has paid ESPN. Luckily, Mediacom has, but Comcast hasn’t — so too bad if you want to watch an NCAA college football game.

For the grand TV fan, online is where you can find several classic TV shows, most of which are found on Hulu. “The Addams Family,” “Barney Miller,” “The A-Team,” “The Rockford Files” and “Who’s the Boss?” are all on Hulu — as well as essentially unseen and short-lived shows like “Lou Grant,” “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Tremors: The Series.”

According to Move Networks, which provides online TV service for ABC, Fox, ESPN and others, online viewership has increased 50 percent since February. The service Move Networks provides requires its own media player, targeted improving the streaming with no buffering.

But the TV rules still apply to their content — George Carlin’s “seven dirty words you can’t say on television” won’t be seen on the various sites. You have to go to YouTube for that.

-Anthony Capps is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Oskaloosa.

Some shows on Hulu:

“30 Rock”

“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”

“Hill Street Blues”

“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

“Mad Men”

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”

“NBC Nightly News”

“NewsRadio”

“The Office”

“Talkshow with Spike Feresten”

Some shows from Veoh:

“A Shot of Love”

“Californication”

“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”

“The Hills”

“Inturn”

“Late Show with David Letterman”

“Mad TV”

“Swingtown”

“Ugly Betty”

“Weeds”

Olympic event

Like ESPN, which limits access to its site based on distributors, NBC limited access during the Olympics, but it didn’t seem to matter.

About 2,200 live hours of the Summer Olympics were shown for Internet viewers by nbcolympics.com, and catered to every sport at the Olympics. The site had more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through the final days of the Olympics.

NBC’s most popular video of Michael Phelp’s winning his second gold medal served up more than 2.3 million views alone.

Although NBC didn’t stream the most popular sports live, Internet viewership was very high and bidding will likely be more competitive when rights to the 2014 and 2016 games come up next year.