Choose And Watch TV

MegVid is another streaming movie site offering mostly recent films from within the last 5 years. The site is clean and seems to be hosted on e-blogger with a few ads scattered across the site. The movie diversity is limited and all of the movies are hosted on megavideo meaning you're bound by the hourly time limit so its going to be difficult to watch an entire movie since they've recently brought down their limit from 75 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes) to 50 minutes. The tips to bypass the time limit simply don't work. With that said there were a few movies that didn't work but the newer posted movies all seemed to work.

The Overall Ratings for MegVid:
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: (4/5)
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: 13/20

MegVid is an ok site but it's mostly riddled with the oversight of most megavideo hosted movies disappearing or being deleted, and the minimal viewing time available to watch movies hosted on megavideo. It would do them better to improve the overall design of the site, and branch out to other hosts.

Heepo is yet another video site specializing in online movie streaming. The navigation is fairly standardd, although a bit clearer than other sites. One little difference is that it uses ajaxish lightbox effect to show the movie or links on the same page. For now ads are a little sparse, and mostly poker themed. Some of the streaming movie links are broken, which is where the mirror links become useful - only many of those links seemed to be broken or removed due to copyright infringment.

There's a good mix of movies, and there seems to be quite a few movies - mostly newer films however. In fact I think the oldest films on this site are from 2007, overall it looks decent if not plain but most of it works. For now the ads are kept to the site and are clean, but that's not necessarily true of the future of this site - so beware.

The Overall Ratings for Heepo:
Show Diversity: (45)
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: (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: 12/20

Heepo is a nice site currently, even with several broken links and somewhat risque gambling ads. While the selection is limited in that it only spans back something like 3-4 years, there is a good mix of films from the years. There are several broken links unfortunately on the site, but it should be watched to see if they get fixed or managed or whether they continue this way. Still for now Heepo looks pretty attractive as a movie streaming site.

MiniMovies is exactly that, short feature documentaries transcribed and created for a digital medium. Currently there are only about 10 or so documentaries on the site, but I'm sure this will grow over time. The documentaries are split into smaller parts that the site calls 'episodes', which together comprise an entire documentary. The quality of the video is fairly good, and the video is simple to use with minimal loading time since they host the videos themselves.

The thing to note is that the documentaries on here are not large major motion picture funded documentaries, but rather smaller independent films made by film students and video enthusiasts. While the selection currently is extremely limited, the quality of what's offered is fairly decent and the variety within that selection is even more diverse with documentaries on various issues from various parts of the world.

One documentary on the site, "Dream City by Tomas Kaan" explores visitors to a theme park in present-day Northern Iraq. Another entitled "Dear Oprah" set a year before US president-elect Barack Obama was elected, delves throughout America's more rustic and forgotten communities to interview and examine these non-voting areas and voters. And another documentary in MiniMovies lineup explores the divide between the real world and the virtual world of Second Life. The content is quite diverse, but the major pitfall of the site lies in the slow growth of the site and the limited amount of documentaries made available. In MiniMovies defense however, the site does offer their content across multiple platforms making it really convienient to watch their content.

The Overall Ratings for Mini Movies:
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: (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

MiniMovies is impressive as a documentary site, while the number of documentaries is limited they almost make up for it by having such a rich collection of documentaries that span such a diverse amount of topics. If the site can speed up the pace with which they add films, and still maintain the apperance and cleaness with respect to ads and annoyances, they could become a vaulable asset in the video market to customers.

TV Dash is a yet another movie streaming site offering movies, the site is rather clean and ads were minimal. While the site also offers tv shows, I'd say that it's not worth visiting for tv shows as they have about 6 tv shows they cover, and they're not exactly all encompassing (never heard of Peep Show?). They have a rather small list of movies, possibly under 100 - which isn't bad because I'd assume it's easier to manage and possibly more of a chance that they're all alive.

All the movies are hosted on MegaVideo, some of them seem to have audio syncing problems which devoids the whole point of watching a movie if you hear the audio first and then the actual picture. But it's a pretty decent site for all things considered. The selection isn't the best, but at least it works.

The Overall Ratings TV Dash:
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: 15/20

TV Dash is worth visiting but the movie selection is a bit too little. The majority of movies on there are pretty fairly regular and can be found on nearly any site of this nature. Movies have some audio syncing problems, but hey it's not all the movies - so you can surely find something worth watching.