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.

Watch Series is another TV and Movie site that lets you watch a number of TV shows and movies that have been collected and uploaded to popular video hosting services. As possibly one of the largest sites, it operates as you would expect - ads are a plenty - but fortunately are not too obtrusive. As a precaution, many of the episode links will take you directly to the video streaming service's site, which is a welcome change, but requires far too many clicks before you're able to start watching an episode.

Some of the episodes I came across were mislabelled presenting episodes out of order, but that's to be expected from what looks like a user-cultivated list of TV shows and links. What remains to be seen is how long WatchSeries will last and whether the spindly tentacles of Hollywood and it's copyright laws will take down yet another video site.

Overall, Watch Series is a good and somewhat reliable source for your favourite shows, movies on the other hand are mixed bag and Watch Series pales in comparison to other sites out on the net, but the again as the title of the site notes - their focus is on tv series and shows, not films.

The Overall Ratings for Watch Series:  
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)
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

Watch Series is a solid source for TV shows and entertainment, but you may want to invest in ad block software as some of the video sites it links to can have racy ads or contain popups. All in all, it's a good place to catch up on your latest dramas & tv shows.