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

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

OmegaTube is a movie streaming site that lists a whole lot of movies available to watch on its site. The design is a little too cluttered for my tastes. But it is easy to find movies that you want to watch. This site bares a strikingly similar look as Atomic Movies - both launch the movies in a popup window that looks practically the same.

Anyways, most of the links seem to be hosted on Toudou, which is located in China and is very slow. So once again streaming movies from this site requires a lot of patience and time to let it load properly. Unlike other sites, OmegaTube offers alternative links to the movies, so if one link is down you can still try and use other sources to watch what you missed or were unable to see.

Advertisements are fairly inconspicous, and the collection of movies has a few television shows mixed in with it, most of which don't work or are hosted on Tudou as well. Unlike the movie counterparts, ther e are no alternative links for the episodes of television shows. As a TV link episode site OmegaTube would recieve a failing grade, but as a movie site - which is what OmegaTube really is - it's decent at times, but if they continue to use Tudou I'd say they mediocre substitute at best.

The Overall Ratings for OmegaTube:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (1/5)
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) (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: 12/20

OmegaTube is yet another movie site using the same rehash of Chinese video host links. There isn't anything distinctly recognizable about this site, which is quite a shame since the site remains to be one of the cleanest ad free sites. But it's close resemblence to Atomic Movies really shows that there is nothing really original about OmegaTube, as a source for movies it seems reliable in that the links won't be deleted any time soon - but they're the movies are just not watchable since you have to wait 10 minutes to load 1 minute of video. A very interesting thing about OmegaTube is that it offers alternate sources to an episode, this would be a great feature if only the alternative links weren't to other slow servers.

OmegaTube isn't bad by any means, it's just doesn't have anything unique going for it to set it apart from other sites.

Labels: movies

Not the most creative name in the world, but Watch the Simpsons Online has been the forerunner of collecting video links to all 19 glorious (ok some have been better then others) seasons of the Simpsons. The site has a lot of advertising, mostly text/banners and the occasional popup which is quite annoying.

Most of the episodes work, although there are a few that don't seem to work. But the biggest problem of this site is that it seems to be down quite often. I'm not talking about the videos, but the site itself. The site seems to be quite popular, and while they don't allow you to download the shows directly - they do provide you with the means to download the episode through some Rapidshare links.

Most of the episodes are hosted on MegaVideo.com, so they load reasonably fast and are pretty good quality. They have all 19 seasons, and I believe all episodes for all the seasons so Watch the Simpsons Online is a pretty good source for Simpsons episodes, there's not much to say as a result.

The Overall Ratings for Watch Simpsons Online:
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: (3/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5) (Lots of Ads throughout Pages, 1-2 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: 14/20

Watch Simpsons Online is a great site to catch up on the 300+ episodes of the Simpsons, and being able to manage and keep most of all those episodes online and working is no easy feat. The site is probably the best Simpsons resources, but it suffers in that the site suffers from reguarl downtime and the ads are a bit much and at times a fairly annoying. Still if you can pull through all that, or have a good ad blocker - Watch the Simpsons Online is a pretty good Simpson episodes source.

Labels: tv links

DivVin is all about streaming DivX (high quality) movie links. The site boasts that even in the death of DivX's Stage6 video platform, high quality video is here to stay. They seem really enthusiastic about high quality streaming, and go on to say that they have movies in OGM and DivX format - it's interesting to note that OGM doesn't always play well using the Stage6 player from my experience.

The site design is ok, but a little drab and navigating it feels awkward. For videos that use OGM you have to download an additional plugin. They don't have a whole lot of movies, and they're fortunately organized by DivX, regular Flash or OGM videos. This makes it so much easier to use and select which videos you really want, especially if you don't feel like installing this OGM plugin like myself.

What really surprises me about DivVin is that the videos actually load, so far other high quality video sites are usually riddled with broken videos and finding a working movie is a test of true patience, if not impossible. DivVin has considerably less movies then most sites, but a good deal actually work. The speeds aren't amazing, but they do load fairly decently (I'd say about 10minute of watchable video every 5 minutes, of course this isn't a reliable measure).


Another nice little thing about DivVin is that you can download the videos, and because this is in DivX format (or OGM) you can burn it and play it directly in your DVD player if it supports DivX format. On a side note, a lot of mobile devices are starting to support DivX format so taking these videos with you should be easy and simpler since you no longer have to convert the videos. There are quite a bit of ads, fortunately they're mostly text ads and none are too intrusive or harmful.

The Overall Ratings for DivVin:
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: (4/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (2/5) (Text/Image 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

DivVin is definately a winner for high quality movies. It doesn't seem to update with all the latest movies, but it does have a good deal of new movies and a mix of some fairly older (within a year or two) movies. They don't have the quantity of videos that other sites have, but they make up for that in quality (not just in DivX high quality video but in the fact that they have very few broken links). DivVin seems to be quite new but it's very well worth your time if you can get around installing the DivX Player and installing any additional programs needed for OGM or other media support.

Labels: movies, tv links

Atomic Movies has lots of movies that you can watch that are hosted on different servers, but mostly Tudou, which is quite slow. Navigation is quite clean and organized by movie topic making it easier to find movies that you would be interested in.

A minor annoyance of the site is that there are movies listed that don't have the full movie, but instead have just the trailer for the movie, this was the case for Harold and Kumar 2. Another problem is that a lot of the films are on slow servers like Tudou, where the average wait time is about 10 minutes for every 3-5 minutes of video. A full length movie could take hours to load and play.

There's a really good selection of movies here, a mix of new and old and Atomic Movies lets you download some of the movies in two clicks so you can watch them with whatever player you want. But since most of the movies are hosted on Tudou you will have difficulty finding something that works, and having to wait a very long time for it to start loading and then playing. This is the biggest problem with Atomic Movies and a few other movie sites. But if you have the time to wait, this is a very decent site.

The Overall Ratings for Atomic Movies:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (1/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (5/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (1/5) (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: 14/20

Atomic Movies has a really good mix up of movies and documentaries. The site is quite clean and free of ads and navigating it is very simple. The only problem with this site is that all or most of the movies on this site are hosted on slow servers and it makes using Atomic Movies a bit of a pain since everything requires waiting for the videos to load which can take a ridiculously long time. Still it is worth checking out.

Labels: movies

MovieSister has television shows and movies, but in browsing it seems to be more focused on movies as the name suggests. The site looks horrible to be honest, the design is really bad and the text is hard to read on the black background. The font is a weird curly one and the copyright at the bottom says 2007 (a little late considering it's 2008). But all those are less important when it comes to whether it works or not.

The movies seem to be more updated then the television shows, so lets start with that. I tried some random movies that were listed on the first movie page. Some didn't work, but the newer movies seem to work but are unfortunately hosted on very slow servers located in China on video hosts like Yoku and Todou. So loading is a bit of a problem, and again you end up having to wait a good 10 minutes to watch 5 minutes worth of video. The good thing is that they do have some videos that are hosted on Google Video which is really fast and if you can be fortunate to find a movie that's using Google Video, you'll be able to snag it quickly.

Television shows are another story, there are shows listed that do not have videos or links for them. Finding a television show that does have links can be annoying as they seem to just list as many shows as possible, many which don't have videos or links for them. Also they have movies listed as tv shows, which is a minor messup but stil worthy of mentioning. Sometimes links don't take you to where they should and clicking to see King of the Hill (animated cartoon) takes you to the Eye 2 - an equally annoying problem, that should be addressed.

The site is geared towards movies, with television shows thrown in as an after-thought The horrible design of MovieSister is forgivable, while the listing of television shows is annoying as you have to really fight to find a link that takes you to the right television episode you had clicked on, and then again fight your way through pages that have no videos or links, and then once again to find something that actually works or doesn't run too slowly.

To top it all off, MovieSister uses Zango a well known adware agent that tries to trick web surfers into installing it to view videos. The appearance of Zango on any site sets off alarms and the best of sites can be rendered unsurfable.

The Overall Ratings for Movie Sister:
Show Diversity: (3/5)
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: (2/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (5/5) (Uses Zango Malware)
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: 7/20

Movie Sister has some serious problems from links that take you to the wrong place, to videos that don't always load, to shows that have no videos. They should have focused only on movies but some herd mentality made them add television shows, most of which either don't work or aren't full episodes. The site design is lacking, but it is fairly decent for watching films. What makes this site not recommended is that it uses Zango, which is potentially dangerous to your privacy and not worth installing. If they removed the Zango malware they could get a higher rating, but right now this site is too dangerous to risk viewing.

Labels: movies, tv links

If you're a fan of the controversial South Park series, you can take solace in that you can now watch the show legally on-line for free. South Park Studios now officially streams full South Park episodes in high quality video. You can watch all the seasons and new episodes are added the day after it airs (of course the latest season completed so you'll have to wait till it starts up again mid-summer before new episodes are added).

Unfortunately South Park Studios only supports US residents. South Park Studios also has clips from episodes, and I think those can be watched by anyone. There's also some South Park games, and a full episode guide for all the seasons and characters. It's a very convenient and reliable way to catch up on the 11-12ish South Park seasons.

The Overall Ratings for South Park Studios:
Show Diversity: (4/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (5/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (4/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (1/5) (An Ad plays before Episodes)
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: 17/20

South Park Studios may not feature hundreds of episodes for various shows, but as a site dedicated to South Park it has every single episode available for streaming. That's 174 episodes in high quality available to be watched, and since this site is legal these episodes are all reliably available to you at any time. The only downside is that is currently only available to those residing in the US, however those in Canada can still watch the episodes through the Comedy Central's Canadian affiliate website The Comedy Network, which streams the episodes. I don't know if other countries can access the episodes on that site but I would assume otherwise.

Labels: tv links

Joox was one of the first sites to start collecting and indexing high quality television episodes and movies. They became quite big and relied heavily on Stage 6, a DivX video site that streamed high quality videos but subsequently shut down after piracy and bandwidth costs became too expensive to continue. Joox has since been struggling and the site has still yet to live up to its former glory day. The site of course requires the Stage6 additional plugin, so you'll have to install some software to watch videos on this site.

Joox is still growing it's database of television shows, but right now I find most videos on the site just don't work. What's nice about the videos that do work is that Joox lets you download the videos to your computer. So you don't have to just use their site, you can easily copy the url and uses a player of your choosing to watch the episodes or to save them to your computer space.

The site is a bit slow to load at times, it can also be a little daunting to find a working link. The reliability of this site has gone down since Stage 6 closed and the site is struggling to balance the removing the broken links with finding new ones. I think Joox is on its way out, but as one of the oldest TV Link sites catering to those that want high quality video - it's definately worth checking out even with all the broken links.


The Overall Ratings for Joox:
Show Diversity: (3/5)
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: (4/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (1/5) (Light amount of ads, text/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: 13/20

Joox is one of those sites that you keep around because its a relic of something that everyone hoped would be around for a while, but unfortunately the site is not as it was and it's extremely tiresome to find a working link on this site. The selection is limited because most of the shows just don't work, and just because you see an episode listed doesn't mean it'll actually work. In the few times I went there, I ended up watching something entirely different from what I wanted to watch - purely because the links don't work and the ones that do are most likely for something you didn't want to see or had no intention to see. If you're looking for something to watch and aren't too picky, Joox will offer you high quality videos for what you can find - but if you're looking to catch up on that Stargate Atlantis episode you missed - you're time is better spent elsewhere.

Labels: tv links

JibJab really doesn't feature any TV show episodes, but instead has some really crazy and far out there shows that they create that prank on celebrities and politicians. They have a small variety of funny clips and they're most known for their off the wall humor and end-of-the-year roundup of a year in review. There New Years Roundup so far has always recieved media attention, so they're doing fairly well.

This isn't full length shows, just tiny little vignettes of Monty Python-esque humor. Good for a cheap laugh.


The Overall Ratings for Project Free TV:
Show Diversity: (3/5)
Based on the mixture of television shows available on the site.
Loading Speed: (5/5)
The time taken to navigate the site and load videos.
Ease of Navigation: (3/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (0/5) (Didn't see any advertisements)
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

JibJab can't really be compared to other sites because they're not all that commercial and you're not going to find television shows on here. Instead you'll find some weird and outrageously funny animations that are quite clever or funny.

Labels: Animation

Hulu is really something else. Unlike all other television sites, Hulu is actually a legal and reliable way to watch television shows. It won the 2007 Webby awards as most innovative website and continues to be one of the driving tv show websites. It's pretty much the only site that allows legal streaming of popular television shows and movies. Unfortunately it's only available to US residing citizens, so if you don't live in the USA you're plain out of luck. There are ways to get around it, but most require special proxy software which are not considered reliable and are not always safe and fool proof.

But for those that do live in the US, Hulu makes catching up on missed television shows a breeze. Hulu has contracts with almost all of the major 4 television channels like NBC, Fox, ABC and CBS. You can watch many of the television shows that have aired on these channels days after they have aired and in really high quality too! They support fullscreen and this entire thing is funded by ads that are strategically placed in the beginning and ending of the shows, and oddly do not really disrupt your watching. The ads are short, lasting no longer then 15 seconds and are actually far more bearable then the 2+ minutes of advertising normally seen during real commercial breaks.

They also have some older films, but most are from 10 or more years ago, but still there's some pretty watchable stuff there. The real problem with Hulu, besides it being restricted to only those in the US, is that you can't save or stream the episodes. The episodes load as they are played, and you won't really notice any problems with that but you can't connect to the Internet - load the video and then disconnect from the Internet as some do. Because of security and anti-piracy methods, you have to be connected to the Internet at all times to watch the episode - which isn't really a problem for most, but for those that like to load the videos beforehand - you should know it won't be possible with Hulu. That's not much of a problem.

Hulu also lets you embed videos on to your site so others can watch. The only thing about Hulu is that it requires registration to watch the episodes and movies, unless of course you watch it through embedded videos on site like OpenHulu. Registration is free so it's not really all that annoying.

The Overall Ratings for Project Free 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: (1/5) (Commercial Breaks embedded in Episodes)
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: 17/20

Hulu is one of the best places to watch television shows if you live in the US. They have plans to make it possible to watch their shows in other countries, but right now that isn't available yet. The fact that you can embed the videos on to any site and the safety of using the site since it's completely legal make it all the more inviting. Hulu is definitely a site you should have in your radar and is one of those sites that those in the US can really count on to catch up on shows that the site supports. With popular shows like Family Guy, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Scrubs and Prison Break under it's wing, it's obvious why Hulu is a smashing success and deserving of one of the highest ratings we can give it.

Labels: movies, tv links

Project Free TV is a pretty ugly, but working site with a few popular television shows listed that can be watched. A large amount of links remain broken on this one, but they do seem to get cleaned off regularly. The selection of shows is quite limited to the regular primetime shows, some of which don't have any videos listed for them. I'm not sure why they even bothered listing television shows they don't have videos for. The television shows they do have are broken down by season and again they list seasons they don't have episodes for, so it's common to see a show listed which lists a season but has absolutely no videos in it.

Project Free TV also lists quite a few movies, mostly recent films. But again it suffers because it lists films it doesn't have video links for. The shows and films for which it does have links work reasonably fast, but there were quite a few that were broken, dead or had been removed for copyright infringement. Overall Project Free TV seems to be best used to watch a movie or television show that has just recently been aired, your chances of the links working are fairly better in those cases.

Fortunately the page hasn't been stuffed with ads, but the navigation of the site is a bit of a problem with a really limited and small movies, tv shows disclaimer links located at the top center of the page. Overall Project Free TV doesn't boast much of the ambience that competing sites have but it does seem to be quite popular.

The Overall Ratings for Project Free TV:
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: (2/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (1/5) (Image 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: 9/20

Project Free TV isn't really all that bad, it doesn't have as great a selection of television shows as TV Shack, but it does have faster loading videos. The main flaws in the site are that they list shows they have no episodes for, and that they only carry mostly newer stuff. Don't expect to find some classic older films, or anything more then 1-2 years old. It's a good start for the very recent stuff, but again it's not completely reliable with probably 20% of the index filled with broken links - if not more. It's ok, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

Labels: movies, tv links

TV Shack offers a really good and long list of television shows that you can watch online, all are streaming. It's one of the oldest and has a really nice mix of shows that are maintained and submitted by users. It's one of the best television show sites, which so far always seems to have working links. The downside is that most of the videos take really long to load and it's common to have to wait upwards of 20-40 minutes to load a single episode of a television show. I have yet to come across a broken link on TV Shack, but you do end up sacrificing load speed for reliability. Most of the videos seem to be hosted on Tudou, which is quite slow for me to load.

Also there are popups on TV Shack and the a while back I could swear the TV Shack F.A.Q. said that the site was non-profit and that all profits would be donated to charity - but I think that was either abandoned or was soon removed. The pop-ups appear only on the episode page (I'm using a popup blocker on Firefox, but these popups still come through so maybe there are more but I'm just not seeing the others), but it still gets fairly annoying since there are other ads on the pages including some flash ads that make a bit of noise and can interfere while watching episodes.

For movies TV Shack is a bit of a disappointment, and it's not very good nor reliable. So I'd recommend TV Shack purely for watching television shows, and as a last resort when no other stream source can be found as the wait time is a bit of an annoyance.

The Overall Ratings for TV Shack:
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: (3/5) (popups + flash ads with sound)
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: 11/20

TV Shack definitely makes it easier to catch up on television shows, but just don't expect to catch up on whole seasons in one go as most of your time using this site will be spent on waiting for videos to load. Another problem is that while there isn't as much advertisements on TV Shack, they do use popups which are fairly annoying and detract from what could be one of the most reliable, albeit slow, TV Link sites.

Labels: tv links

Choose And Watch Television is the ultimate portal for reviews on live streaming television sites. Each week we'll try to collect a handful of sites to watch TV episodes and Live Television streams and briefly review them. The main purpose is to give you a great collection of sites that you can get your fill of entertainment from.

Í don't intend to post tv shows or anything of that sort here, so don't come asking for it. Instead we'll post some great kick ass television sites, and you can head on over to check them out. I'll try to update this every week, so subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you're always one step ahead of everyone else on the best sites to watch shows.

There's really too many crap sites, or sites just out to make a very fast buck and don't even have real episodes or shows. Plus now some sites are taking to begging for donations or using that dreadful Zango spyware. We will not tolerate any site that has mandatory registration, Spyware or Malware, or requires you to download a customized player for the site (no that doesn't mean Flash player, but rather special extra programs to play the videos besides Flash or Div X). Comments will be open for everyone to comment on the sites, maybe we missed out on something that you can correct.

We will not take any money or bribes to review sites, so no paid ads or sponsored reviews. That means we will be fair unobjective - any site that can't stand up to the criticism shouldn't operate. And any site that won't pledge to rejecting bribes or payment for reviews is not worth your time. Don't put up with it.

Cool links:
OvGuide Free Web Hosting A List Directory

Labels: a review site thats fair, free tv shows, live tv, manifesto, new beginnings, no sponsorship, tv link search, tv links, watch tv