Choose And Watch TV

StageNext is a video site that has high quality videos of some television shows. It also has movies but there weren't very many (less then 30) and most weren't actual movies that you would recognize mostly some really obscure stuff. The site is quite slow to load, and the about and Faq parts of the site don't even work. There's a lot of old cartoons and Star Trek episodes, and what was flagged as pornography but was titled obscurely. It turned out it was episodes of Malcolm in the Middle which for some reason required you to be over eighteen years of age to watch?

The entire design and working of the site seems to be a real copy of Stage 6 so it does work. The videos load surprisingly fast. Some of the shows, like South Park, are ripped straight from the DVD and have additional footage so that was quite nice. There's also an option to download the videos but it requires you to reload the page after having played the video, which is kinda stupid since you can just right click on the divx web player and click save file as.

Some of the things on this site require you to register an account, and there seems to be a premium membership that you can buy. Although there was no way to find out more or even to learn about what it offers without registering first. There's 26 pages of tv shows and most are a mix between south park, malcolm in the middle, zelda, star trek, boy meets world, and a few episodes of Lost from Season 4.


The Overall Ratings for Stage Next:
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: (3/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (1/5) (Couple of Banner 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

Stage Next doesn't have a lot of television shows, but what it does have is a whole lot of fast loading and working televisoin shows. I only recently heard about this site so I'm anxious to see how long this site lasts. Right now it seems reliable but the site loads sluggishly and they could improve on this by fixing or buying some better hosting. Stage Next could really take high quality videos to the next level, if only they had more of a wider television show selection.

Labels: tv links

MovieLab TV is a movie streaming site that has Hollywood and Bollywood films. The site has a wide collection of movies, including a mixture of old films and fairly new films. A lot of the movies appear to be hosted on MegaVideo, meaning that the videos load fairly fast - of course MegaVideo also offers ocassional problems like videos that don't load properly or videos that sputter. One problem I noticed is that MovieLab TV seems to have a few movies that are wrongly labelled. A front page featured movie was titled as Mad Money, but actually lead to Mr Magoriums Wonder Emporium.

The movies are organized by genre but you can also search for any particular movie. Looking for International films besides Bollywood films was fruitless, so this is best used for Hollywood and Tami Hindi Bollywood films. They don't have rare movies, this isn't so much a criticism as something that would really skyrocket this sites appeal. There isn't a great deal of Animated films, but still this site is packed with working movies - most of which are hosted on MegaVideo meaning that almost all the movies on the site are watchable and will load quite decently.

There are quite a few ads, but none that are overly intrusive. One problem with the site however is that there are a few misleading links, that are in fact actually advertisements. For example, the Movie Lab TV gives the impression of giving you the ability to download the movies - but clicking on the link will actually take you some site that attempts to sell you a package to download videos and movies via usenet / p2p.

The Overall Ratings for MovieLab TV:
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: (4/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (2/5) (Misleading Links)
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: 16/20

Movie Lab TV is an excellent site for movies, it offers decent streaming videos that unlike most other movie sites are quite watchable in both quality and load speed. There are a few videos that don't link to the right movie, or that don't load - but still you will find movies that you want to watch that actually work. You'll find that this is in stark contrast to a lot of other movies sites in that with other sites you end up watching whatever works, but with Movie Lab TV you really do have quite a choice in movies to pick from. The only problem with this site was that there are links on it that are directly intended to mislead visitors into visiting ads.

Labels: movies

WizMovies is a movie streaming site, which is quite easy to navigate with a list of genres on the side to sort through the movies. They have quite a few movies, and some are hosted on Google Video which loads relatively fast - while others take the standard route and are hosted on the awfully slow Youku and Tudou.

There are a good deal of links that are broken, the embed displays but the video appears to have been deleted. I'm not sure what the update rate is for this site but there doesn't seem to be a high turn over rate since most of the movies are hosted on the slow but reliable Chinese video platforms. Certain movies have alternate sources using hosts like MegaVideo, GoogleVideo and GoFish. The quality of the videos aren't very good but are still watchable, some of the movies are cam copies which are blurry videos illegally taken inside a movie theatre when the film is first released in theatres. These tend to of very low quality with the audio being hard to hear and the audience of the theatre affecting the quality of the video and audio (it's common to hear laughter, coughing or to see sihloutted image of a person moving horizantally across the seats to leave or go to the washrooms).

WizMovies could be improved by having a search feature, currently you're limited to just looking them up on the full movie list section which is fortunately organized alphabetically. Also the site design is nice but the text is barely readable and some fine tuning could improve the readability of the page. There are also a few misleading link ads on the side menu that could confuse visitors, so that distracts from the overall use of this site but overall nothing serious asides from most of the movies being on slow and barely usable servers. But there are a few movies that are hosted on fast servers that are worth checking out.

The Overall Ratings for Wiz Movies:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (2/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (3/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (2/5) (Affiliate Ads, Misleading Links)
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

Wiz Movies has a good deal of movies, the reason why this site is worth recommending is that its pretty clean of ads and while most of the movies can't be watched because they are hosted on slow servers - you may come across a few movies worth seeing that are hosted on reliable or fast servers. For this reason Wiz Movies is worth visiting if all else fails, but most of this is because the site is devoid of ads or popups - if they even include more ads without changing most of the videos hosted on their site, Wiz Movies would not be worth visiting. Currently they have a great balance between not being too obtrusive with ads, and having a fair share of movies that actually work.

Labels: movies