Choose And Watch TV

Surf the Channel is a tv link and movie streaming site similar to TVShack. The sites design is very professional and you could be forgiven for thinking this site site was from the Network producers of NBC or ABC. SurftheChannel seems to let you filter what host you want to see videos for, so I'd assume it only shows videos that they have that are on that video host - but this doesn't seem to work at all. Clicking on the filter links on the right top side it just won't work in Firefox.

The first thing that will jump out at you when using Surf the Channel is that their are popups. The ads at first are quite sparse, but as you navigate and being watching videos you'll notice a few flash ads and a popup on every other page. This isn't very pleasing considering that the site also has a few misleading links that make it appear that you can download the link, but these are in actuality just referral links to pay-to-download sites.

I tried a few shows and found most of the links to once again go through Tudou, which is notoriously slow to load in lu of it being reliable in that most videos situated on the Chinese video host have yet to be deleted. Several television show episodes have alternate link sources so you can always try the non-Todou link if one exists. Most of these sources are MegaVideo, which has a strict policy for limiting the amount of videos you can watch in a day for some countries - so that may be a problem for some users.

Surf The Channels movie selection is long and plentiful. But again most are hosted on Todou and Yoku and suffer from the before mentioned problems with slow loading speeds. What's also bad is that most of the movies (all that I encountered) did not have any alternate sources so most of the long list of movies are unwatchable, that is unless you can put up with Toudou which recently has been quite jerky and sometimes fails to load the entire video and will stop at 20-30% without being able to resume, a quirk that means you have to reload the entire video from the beginning.

The Overall Ratings for Surf The Channel:
Show Diversity: (5/5)
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: (5/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5) (Misleading Links, Popups and 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: 15/20

Surf the Channel wins big because it has a really nice design, an active collection of videos being added and an attempt to make watching television shows and movies simpler by having additional sources available to watch. They could go the step further and improve by moving away from Toudou but that would require uploading the shows and movies themselves to other hosts which runs the gambit of legality over the the copyrighted works. Surf the Channel is worth checking out, mostly for Television shows as so far its movie section isn't quite up to snuff.

Labels: movies, tv links