Choose And Watch TV

iTricks TV is a video site focusing on magic tricks. The site has quite a few magic videos grouped by performer. The site could do with more videos, as there are usually only about 1 or 2 pages of videos for each performer. The videos are all hosted on youtube from my experience with the site, so it's not really fair to call this a video site in that it doesn't actually hosts the videos.

The design and operability of the site is nice but it could have done with a bit more colour in the design considering it's a magic site and should be more spritely. The site is very clean with only one banner ad appearing on the site, which is quite nice and welcoming comparitively.

The Overall Ratings for iTricks TV:
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)
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

iTricks TV doesn't look like what you'd expect from a magic video site (that is a video site about magic) in design, but the video content is there - although quite sparse. The site could do with a few more videos, and possibly could benefit from hosting the videos itself to further brand the site. There doesn't seem to be very many video sites in this particular field, and iTricks tv could easily corner the market if they were to make a few small changes to their design as well as the variety and quantity of their content. If you're into magic, check this one out.

Alba Vid is yet another movie site claiming to offer high-quality video streams of the latest movies. The front page design in stark contrast to other sites is quite clean and bare and presents about 8 movies (4 featured and 4 requested).

There's quite a few movies listed, but it's not easy navigating through them because they're not categorized. So you have to go through them manually through more than 25 pages, or optionally if there's a particular movie you're looking for you can use the search to find it. There's a good mix of movies however, and while they all seem to be from within the last 10 years, you'll find a few movies from slightly earlier.

Each listing has a play movie and play trailer next to it, which is a good touch for getting a grasp of a movie's plot or whether you're interested or not. Amazingly the videos I tried actually worked - but were a little bit slow. The downside was that there was a very garrish ad situated above the video screen which really stands out. Fortunately you can always enable full screen mode and ignore the ad that way. You'll need to install the DivX codec player, since all the movies on this site seem to be hosted on VUPlayer.

The Overall Ratings for Alba Vid:
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)
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

Alba Vid overall is quite nice, while it doesn't boast as large a collection as many other sites in the field of HD it does seem to have more movies that work, which I guess is more important at the end of the day. One of the main pros about this site is that it keeps things sparse and simple, and while I'm not sure if the creator did that intentionally, it's definately something they should hold on to.

Garlicoon is a video site about food and wine recipes, and also sounds slightly racist. I'm not entirely sure what the name means or why they didn't go for something more catchy garlicky or garlical. What Garlicoon does have is a bunch of videos from various video sites, mostly YouTube, on the matter of cooking. It's not really it's own video site, but a food site based off of the Ning free Social Network platform.

The site isn't entirely original, and seems slapped together over the course of a few hours. The quality of the videos aren't very good, although now and then there are a few professionaly done videos that appear to advertising rival cooking video sites. Certain videos seemed out of place or were entirely unrelated to food (I'm not sure what a video on skateboarding is doing on a food site).

The Overall Ratings for Garlicoon:
Show Diversity: (2/5)
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: (1/5)
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

Garlicoon could be much more, the name is not enticing but asides from that the content looks rushed and put together using some sort of automation with many low quality videos being mixed in with the better ones. I'm not entirely sure this should be labelled a video site considering that it seems to be pulling videos directly from YouTube and with no visible filter for quality. I wouldn't recommend Garlicoon.