Choose And Watch TV

Anime Flare is a video site featuring Japanese Manga and animated cartoons. The site sports a nice look and videos are easy to find using the search feature. The only problem is that many of the videos are hosted on veoh, a site that only very recently started limiting video playback to a handful of countries (most of which are in the West). This means that if you're not in North America or regional Europe, you're out of luck for watching many of the anime tv shows. Another glaring problem is that a huge number of episodes are dead and while they appear to get fixed every now and then, they usually wind up dead within a week of being fixed.

Site updates are a little lackluster with about 1 episode being added every day, which isn't very much when you get down to it. The selection was diverse but the availability of some videos was questionable with a few being slow to load or in the case of Veoh hosted videos - not accessible at all from my current location.

The Overall Ratings for Anime Flare:
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)
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

Anime Flare could definitely improve their offerings and where the videos are hosted. The site is a good idea and it's designed nicely and the absence of ads is a pleasant and welcome change, but there are too many broken links and using sites like veoh and megavideo are more of a barrier and hindrance to using such sites.

Anime Seed is yet another anime episode streaming site. There's just way too many of these sites, but I guess they service a big need for anime. The site is quite nice looking, ads on the pages are quite sparse and the design looks great. The biggest problem is that it loads a chatroom widget on every single page which is both annoying and slow to the overall page load. There were 100 people in the chatroom, each time someone talks it makes a little "bing" noise, with just a quarter of those people talking it was fairly noisy and annoying.

Now while the main page is clean, the episodes are not. Each episode launches in a popup which again is a really annoying way to show episodes since you can't open them in a new tab. On top of that they have a full page ad that displays over the site every single time an episode is launched. This is highly annoying and most of the videos appear to be hosted on megavideo which has a time limit on how long you can watch for free. The site would be usable if not for the full frame ad appearing every pageload, coupled with the popup and chat widget.

The Overall Ratings for Anime Seed:
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: (3/5)
How easy is it to use and navigate.
Advertisements: (3/5)
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

Anime Seed had the potential of being a good site, but the site really falters in that they load a chat widget on all pages except for episode pages. On top of that they made a very bad decision in having an ad that appears over episode pages for each episode viewed. This can make it extremely confusing to differentiate the ad from the episode site. Moreover making the episode pages pop up can be quite tedious as if you were to try and load multiple episodes for whatever reason you would end up having the popup reload with the new page each time you launched a new episode (it recycles the old popup so forget about buffering another episode as you watch one). Several of the episodes we tested worked, only a few were broken - it's an otherwise good site wrecked by the ads and major annoyances of the site.