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MMAHacks (Mixed Martial Arts Hacks) claims to be a video all about martial arts from UFC Fighting to Judo. My first impression visiting the site was how ugly the site looks. It's bleak with nothing on the page besides a dull coloured table of a few video titles - about 35 in total to be exact. The site started in October 2008, about a little less than 3 months time and there's only 35 videos? One interesting thing is the site has an actual address for the owner given at the bottom of the site:

Contact: mmahacks@gmail.com | XChiang General Manager, 3617 Tower One, Lippo Centre, 89 Queensway - Hong Kong

I don't know if that was intentional, but it's certainly quite nice to know that the owner is willingly to be in contact with the users. I'm quite certain the address probably leads to a P.O. box, because otherwise they are leaving themselves open to a lawsuit. The very nature of most modern video sites, of which MMAHacks is definately amongst, is that they host copyrighted content under the protection of the anonmity that their sites give them. By disclosing this information so publicly, organizations with the distribution rights can much more easily get ahold and hold the individuals responsible for the piracy of their content.

MMAHacks has few videos but it also offers a live stream of UFC, Dream, Affliction, EliteXC, TUF Episodes - but it requires a plugin that on closer inspection was not the safest to install and requied the much loathed Internet Explorer to play. Video pages are filled with ads a long one on the left and a small squarish but more annoying one on the right.


The Overall Ratings for MMAHacks:
Show Diversity: (2/5)
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: (4/5)
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

MMAHacks gets a bare passing grade because at the end of the day, most of the videos work. The site is not entirely all that great, the design is poor and the ads are extremely annoying. The site needs more videos, you can't really call 30 something remotely hosted embedded videos a "video site". The content isn't all that varied, and the ads are one of the major drawbacks - keeping this site from being even more of an eyesore then it already is. Not to judge a site by the design or how it looks, but a site offering so little could really stand to improve itself by stlying the site up with at the very least a proper navigation menu. The site looks like it was created in the early 1990s, and it doesn't seem to be updated all that often. Overall if you're looking for some fighting videos you could check out MMAHacks, but it really isn't worth your time just yet.

Labels: martial arts, tv links