Choose And Watch TV

Family Guy Now streams Family Guy episodes, and the Family Guy movies that were released. They seem to have all the episodes and both 2 movies, both of which were split up into episodes and aired as part of the 5th and 6th seasons.

There's a few flash ads which really slow things down, they were soundless but they were quite annoying since they had moving animations. Some of the episodes displayed an error message saying something along the lines of "This site not authorized to embed this video", either they're leeching videos off of another site or the video code was messed up. Regardless, most of the videos worked but were hosted on GoFish a mediocre to slow loading video site. The videos load about average, it's not amazingly fast but it's not as horribly slow as Tudou. The loading kept about 10 seconds ahead of the actual playback so fortunately there were no problems in waiting for laggy playback since the video kept loading as it was played - that was quite nice.

There isn't a lot to say about Family Guy Now, it's focused on just Family Guy episodes. If you're a fan of the random comedy of the show - this site is definately for you. But if you're not a fan, then this site doesn't have anything for you. The videos load well enough, and the quality while not amazing is very watchable. The ads can be quite a bit annoying and not all the episodes work, but a good share of them do and that's enough to keep me coming back.



The Overall Ratings for Family Guy Now:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (3/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (4/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5) (Annoying Animated Flash ads)
Based on the annoyance level of advertisements on this site, the amount of ads, and the volatility of ads appearing on the page.
The lower the rating, the less annoying the ads are.

Total Score: 14/20

Family Guy Now is one of the best sites to catch up on Family Guy, the fact that they haven't tried to do anything else but stick to Family Guy episodes has allowed them to have a pretty stable and good collection of working videos.

Labels: tv links

VReel caters to those that want to watch high quality streaming videos. There are some television shows and movies mixed in with what is mostly music videos. There's a lot of Penn & Teller episodes, many of which work using the DivX web player plugin, which you will have to install.

Navigation is a bit tricky as there's no seperating of movies from television shows or the rest of the videos, everything is just jumbled together and loosely arranged by a few categories on the left hand menu when clicking the channels category. The site is quite clean and free of ads (from what I saw at least).

Most of the television episodes work, which is good considering other sites are usually riddled with broken links. The downside to VReel is the lack of selection, there's really a limited number of shows on here - most of which could be summed as Penn & Teller episodes, mixed with a few Anime episodes, mixed with music videos and some viral videos. Also navigating the site to find something of interest to you, if you don't have a specific show in mind, can be daunting as you have to go through the myriad of videos available on this site. Also there was an error in displaying something at the top - they'd probably want to get rid of those messages to prevent confusion.

The Overall Ratings for VReel:
Show Diversity: (3/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (4/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (2/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (0/5) (No Ads as of the time of this review)
Based on the annoyance level of advertisements on this site, the amount of ads, and the volatility of ads appearing on the page.
The lower the rating, the less annoying the ads are.

Total Score: 14/20

VReel is a very good site for high quality videos, but they need to work on the navigation to make it easier to seperate television shows and movies from the other vifdeos on the site. The current categories just don't do justice to the site. The lack of any visible advertising is welcoming, and while there isn't great diversity in the available shows it's impressive that many of the videos do work.

Labels: tv links

TVcells is a movie site mainly for Chinese and Korean movies. Something that stands out immediately is that they spelt the site title wrong on the logo - the site name is TVcells but the logo only says TVCell. It's a small mistake that doesn't look too good on them since they couldn't remember to spell their own name right in their logo.

TVCells is a little different from all the other tv link sites in that it caters only to an East Asian audience, so don't expect to find Hollywood or American movies and shows on here, working ones that is - they do list American movies and shows but they were only trailers or clips, not actual episodes or full length films. There's a lot of ads and some on the right are a little racy, with Asian dating ads.

Upon trying to watch some of the Korean movies listed on here, I noticed they were mostly all trailers or preview reels taken off of YouTube. So the content seems to just illegitimate trailers and previews hashed together to try and appear as actual movies. There were a few movies that actually worked on this site, and they were all located on the right hand menus under a section called premium videos. I don't know why they're called premium, but you don't have to pay anything or signup to watch anything. The navigation on TVCells is quite bad, the ads are purposefuly placed to confuse visitors into clicking them by thinking they're part of the navigation of the site. It would be ok if this was done in moderation but a deliberate attempt to confuse visitors at every section makes this site barely usable.

The Overall Ratings for TVCells:
Show Diversity: (3/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (3/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (1/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (2/5) (Lots of Banner Ads, Adult-Dating ads)
Based on the annoyance level of advertisements on this site, the amount of ads, and the volatility of ads appearing on the page.
The lower the rating, the less annoying the ads are.

Total Score: 10/20

TVCells is filled with trailers, and previews and would be good if only it labelled itself as a trailer site. But TVCells claims to be a 'source for Asian cinema' and at that it fails because of the sheer amount of ads, the lack of working videos and because of the bad navigation. To top it all, TVCells is filled with trailers and previews that it attempts to pass off as full episodes or full length Korean/Japanese/Chinese films and dramas. It doesn't take long before you realize that most of the site is padded with these preview videos from YouTube that are about 2 minutes long. Still TVCells does have a few movies that work or are available - why they don't just focus on these videos and instead hide them is a mystery yet to be solved. At this time, while there aren't very many sites catering to Asian cinema - this site still just doesn't have the goods for it to be recommended.

Labels: movies

FOMDB stands for Free Online Movie DataBase, not necessarily original but known simply as FOMDB. The first thing that hit me on visiting this site was a barrage of popup windows. Actually it was one popup that subsequently launched 4 or 5 other popup windows. So my expectation from this site immediately sank as soon as that happened.

The site design is nice and simple, and there's a search box at the top for direct look-ups. Navigation is difficult because this looks like a video host, and the frontpage shows a lot of clips of various movies and television shows but no immediate place to see a list of movies is apparent on the frontpage, so you're stuck using the genre links on the lower bottom of the page to navigate through the videos available. Be sure to click on movies, and not select a genre at the same time or else you'll be limiting the movies to only those within that genre. This is a pretty tricky site to navigate because it resembles a video host but is actually a regular movie database site.

Most of the movies are hosted on Veoh, which is a nice change from all the Yoku and Toudou links on other sites - which of course FOMDB does use as well. The primary problem is that Veoh only lets you watch a 5 minute video preview, so you have to download Veoh TV to watch the entire films. I didn't feel like 'having another useless player sitting around so I found myself limited to just Yoku and Toudou movie links. If you do install the player there's a lot of movies to watch, most of which look to be higher quality then their Yoku counterparts.

FOMDB also tries to dabble in television shows but fails miserably because of the limited selection and that they rely on Tudou video links.

The Overall Ratings for FOMDB:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (4/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (2/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5) (Popups)
Based on the annoyance level of advertisements on this site, the amount of ads, and the volatility of ads appearing on the page.
The lower the rating, the less annoying the ads are.

Total Score: 12/20

FOMDB is a reasonably good destination for movies, mainly because they use a video platform that others don't use - Veoh. Veoh however requires downloading a special program that is known to be bloated with usless features and tag-along software that gets installed in the process, but if you can get over all this you could use FOMDB to watch a collection of older classic films that load quite quickly and are relatively good quality. The major downsides is the tricky navigation, which makes clicking a chore and could confuse visitors into seeing screen after screen of movies that or video clips that aren't related to what they have searched for. Additionally the numerous popups experienced throughout using this site were extremely annoying, if you use this site I'd strongly recommend a good popup blocker.

Labels: movies