Did you miss last night’s episode of Lost because of a cappella rehearsal? Did your numbskull roommate forget to tape Commander in Chief while you were playing Frisbee on the lakefill?

Fear not – at least for May and June. During these two months, ABC will air episodes of its most popular dramas on its Web site.

Of course, there’s a catch. Viewers will not be able to fast forward through commercials, but they will be able to pause the streaming video and select between an episode’s “chapters,” a move that isn’t just designed to appease advertisers, says Karen Hobson, Vice President of Digital Media/Corporate Communications for the Disney-ABC Television Group.

“We’re doing it to learn as much as we can,” she says. “We know people are interested in watching TV on the Internet, but to what extent?”

The episodes on ABC’s site will be encoded and streamed using Flash 8, and viewers will have two sizes to choose from – the standard 500×282-pixel screen size and the larger 700×394. Starting May 1, the previous week’s episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias and Commander-in-Chief will go up. Each consecutive week the shows will be posted the day after they originally air, and all the episodes will stay up until the trial ends on June 30.

Hobson says ABC chose shows they felt would benefit most from an online run. All four shows have fairly complex plotlines that depend on the viewer knowing what happened in previous episodes.

“Now if someone misses an episode, they can just hop online and watch,” Hobson says.

ABC was first to offer television episodes on iTunes, though NBC quickly followed suit. Broadcast giant CBS remains conspicuously off the list of available networks on iTunes, with the exception of CBS Sports.

But episodes on iTunes cost $1.99 per download. There are no commercials, but some students say that’s a price they don’t feel the need to pay.

“I probably wouldn’t pay that,” says Weinberg freshman Matt Kutnick, a self-described Lost fanatic. He watches it each week, but every once in a while he’ll miss an episode. Because of the complexity of the show, Kutnick says, missing even one episode can result in viewer confusion, which is why he believes ABC is not trying to hook new viewers.

“I think if people weren’t watching when the show was regularly on, they probably wouldn’t watch otherwise,” he says. “It can get hard to follow.”

Though $1.99 doesn’t sound like a whole lot for some commercial-free catch-up, Kutnick says he’s still reluctant to dip into his savings for a television show.

And even though it seems plenty of other people are not – judging by Lost’s consistent perch atop iTunes’ list of the most-downloaded TV shows – Hobson says piracy is becoming a huge problem for the networks.

“You can go anywhere on the Internet and illegally download an episode of one of our shows,” she says.

And she’s right. Web sites like TV.com and assorted viewer blogs offer free downloads of ad-free episodes, not to mention the hundreds of peer-to-peer downloading programs people can use to obtain episodes. It’s the “ad-free” part that troubles the networks, who rely on advertising for revenue.

Besides the Internet and P2P programs, the popularity of digital video recorders (DVRs) is another reason networks are putting episodes online, Hobson says. The number of TiVo customers just passed 4.4 million, indicating that more viewers want shows to conform to their schedules.

“It’s a changing world,” says Scott Grogin, Vice President of Corporate Communications for Fox. Though Fox does not yet offer any of its programming online, the network recently made a unique deal with its 187 affiliates that allows for the sharing of any revenue that may come from the “non-linear” ways of viewing shows – online or through iTunes.

“In a nutshell, what the other networks are saying is, ‘We’re going to make these deals, but we’re not going to consult you, and we’re going to profit,'” Grogin says. “We’re cooperating with our affiliates.”

Hobson disagrees with Grogin, saying that after the two-month Web trial, ABC will share all of its information with its affiliates, and all parties will come to an agreement on revenue and distribution of online programming.

But even with programming becoming more digitized, most people agree that the television set will still be around for awhile.

“There will always be room for live TV,” Grogin says. “There will always be programming that people will want to participate in, like American Idol.”

In fact, says Grogin, viewers’ overwhelmingly positive reactions to shows that require audience participation – such as Idol, Dancing With the Stars, and Skating With Celebrities – could be steering the content of network programming toward a more interactive format.

But Grogin admits those days are still distant.

“With television these days,” he says, “you just never know.”

Medill freshman Oriana Schwindt is a PLAY writer. She can be reached at [email protected].