Choose And Watch TV

As inflation continues to soar, you can rest assured that thankfully there's alternatives to expensive products that we want, but don't necessarily need - entertainment and cable subscriptions being one of those things we cherish, even if our wallet doesn't.

Fortunately, FreeTube, a site from 2006 that we thought had disappeared has come back with a renewed platform offering a host of legal and free-to-watch cable TV channels you can enjoy from your browser. A lot has changed with technology, and you no longer need to have flash or operating system-based video players, like WinAmp or RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, to watch these live tv streams anymore.

The streams load very fast and channel changing is now simple with the categorization made more static than the site previously had featured nearly 2 decades earlier. I was able to watch CNN before flipping to MSNBC and then watching Discovery Channel and even other independent TV channels dotted across the continental USA.

I would love to see more International channels and the library build-up to 1000s of channels, as Free Tube had previously boasted in the early days of the web 2.0 streaming era. However, this is a great start and I can't wait to see more.

Show Diversity: (5/5) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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.  

Great site, can't wait to see more live tv channels. Works on mobile, as well as desktop which is a nice perk in the 16 years since we first featured it.

Popcorn Time is a little different than what we normally review here on Choose and Watch, as it's actually free software that you run on your machine that attempts to closely mimic Netflix-like services. Once downloaded and installed, Popcorn Time loads up a list of the latest movies and TV shows current out, with the ability to search for previous movies or titles. It doesn't require you to signup or login, in fact the entire system works immediately after installing - and the legality of it remains highly questionable.

Once you've started, the program lets you sort by TV Shows and movies and also lets you further filter by sub-genres (action, drama, sci-fi, etc.). Once you've selected a show/movie, you are given details about the movie, including whether subtitles are available and in what languages. You can even watch a trailer of the movie/show before committing to it. An important part of how Popcorn TV works is that it uses torrents, this means that while watching you will be downloading the video and simulatenously uploading it to other users. Based on this, Popcorn asks you to select the quality you wish to see the video in and displays the amount of seeders (people who have the full video) and leechers (the people downloading it) to get a sense of how long it'll take you to buffer/download it.

Popcorn Time will then set out to download the video and instead of waiting for the entire file to download, it will download the first chunk of the file and immediately start playing it with subtitles so that you can begin watching it while the rest of the video continues to download it. Initially, it might take a few minutes to load up that first section (depending on your internet speed and quality selected, this should only be a few minutes). Popcorn TIme tries to keep things simple and where it downloads the file is still a mystery, as once it completes playing the movie - it deletes the files to prevent users from keeping it.

Once a video is loaded up and starts playing, you will be given the choice to watch it on your current device or to stream it to a number of DNLA services - such as Google Chromecast - effectively letting you watch the video remotely or wherever you want. Did I mention that Popcorn Time also has a mobile app, so you could potentially connect to other DNLA devices to stream the video. You are also provided with the ability to swap in subtitles or change languages, which works pretty well behind the scenes finding the right subtitles for the movie you selected.

Moreover, Popcorn Time now even comes with a built-in VPN to protect user's privacy when downloading with torrents. Although, I couldn't get this to work - despite multiple attempts to unlock. A few bugs remain apparent when trying to close out of tv shows or movies, which seldom goes back to the previous screen without making several attempts to click the x to close the video.

The Overall Ratings for Popcorn Time Software:
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: (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: 17/20

Popcorn Time is a great idea and executed very well - the original creators closed it down, but not before a number of other developers managed to snag the code and replicate it. It's integration with Chromecast makes streaming movies and shows very easy, and makes it a very effective alternative to services like Netflix. With the closure of the Pirate Bay, Popcorn Time's software as a platform approach might prove difficult for piracy organizations to dent - since it essentially revolves around torrents. The legality is questionable about Popcorn Time, but that asides, it's a very nice system with only a few quirks and bugs in starting and closing videos - all of which could be easily ironed out in future releases.

Movielab.tv is another movie streaming site that offers links to the latest movies out in theatres, as well as a few old classics. They also have a few TV shows, but a good deal of those links didn't seem to work be updated. Most went to StageVu (a slowish divx streaming site), where most videos appear to have been deleted or lost.


There were more movie options for Movies, but be careful as this site (like many others) mixes paid viewing options with free options - so you can easily be tricked into visiting one of the spammy/p2p programs that claim to offer movie downloads.

A number of video sources weren't working  - which seems to show that the old video sources for each movie are not cleaned up or added often enough as some of the other movie sites. Additionally, there was an annoying "download this plugin" ad fixed to the top of the site that made browsing MovieLab TV extremely tedious and obtrusive. However, this is made up by the collection of movies and working video streams -albeit quite slow on some sources.

Overall Ratings for Movie Lab TV:  
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: (2/5)
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: 16/20

Movie Lab TV could be easily improved by fixing up the navigation and cleaning out sources regularly. Also the TV shows seem to have been added as an after-thought. Overal, Movie Labs TV isn't a strong movie streaming site, but it certainly is an option for watching newer and more recent films..

Show Links TV is another directory of video links to tv shows and movies. The site is fairly straightforward in theory, select a show and select an episode and start watching. However, navigating within the show between episodes was very slow and it took a few minutes to get the episode list loaded between each season.

Fortunately many of the episodes have multiple links / sources so that you can try to find a host that works best. Many of the links I checked (MegaVideo) were deleted, so the list doesn't appear to be regularly moderated or cleaned.

Not having much success with TV shows, I decided to switch over to movies to see if I'd have more success with it. But unfortunately the experience was worse - as I wasn't able to expand the categories. So back to watching TV shows it was, and a quick search on Bob's Burgers revealed many links for season 1- but they were all broken or deleted. Sigh!

The Overall Ratings for ShowLinks TV:

Show Diversity: (3/5)
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: (4/5)
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: 10/20

Show Links TV simply didn't work. In the 30 minutes I spent surfing the site, I was unable to find a working link for a show that I wanted to watch. I tried nearly seven different TV shows, but to no avail.

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.