FileShareFreak THE source for BitTorrent & P2P Tips, Tricks and Info.

A review of Movie ‘Streaming’ Websites, and why it works.

Websites that feature full-length movies shown as ’streaming’ video have taken great strides in becoming quite remarkable. Some even offer films & clips in High-Definition (HD). So how do they get away with it, you ask? Simple! They don’t host the movies - just the links to them. This lovable loophole even permits them to play the movies on their sites, while staying and inch or two out of the MPAA’s reach.

Very few ‘free’ online movie sites actually host the movies themselves - it requires an enormous amount of bandwidth, not to mention the legalities associated with hosting copyrighted content. The solution? They use inadvertent carriers such as youtube, megavideo, stage6, video.google, veoh.com etc. - all of which offer a staggering amount of video - but frown upon any copyrighted content submitted by their users. Uploaded content is heavily moderated - and promptly deleted - if and when something is found to be in direct violation of the sites’ policies on copyright infringement. Well, piracy is a wonderful weed - give it just a crack of sunlight and an iota of soil, and it will happily flourish. Movie piracy has found an opportunistic niche within the folds of the youtubes - almost the same way that pirates have inundated the 1-click file hosting sites with illegal content, as in the case of rapidshare and megaupload.com. The exact same ideology bodes true for youtube - copyrighted content gets uploaded; it becomes discovered and gets deleted; someone else re-uploads it under a different filename. It’s an infinite cat-and-mouse game in a world where there’s too many mice and not enough felines.

What we’re trying to drive home is this: you’ll not find many movies by doing any searching from within streaming video sites like youtube, veoh and megavideo.com. Content that obvious is a sure-fire candidate for immediate deletion. Take, for example, the newly released movie “Step Up 2 - The Streets” - found everywhere as a CAM release on P2P, but you can’t find it on video.google.com. That is, you can’t find it by searching video google (all you’ll find are 2- minute clips & trailers), but it IS there Click here to do the search, and click here to watch the movie.

That’s where an intermediary 3rd party website comes in: they provide the proper links and search tools to find the movies. Many also have a hand in the uploading of the films, themselves - and thus they are able to provide viable links, since it was them that put it on youtube in the first place. And since it’s normal protocol to post it under an alias, pseudonym or anonymous link - this makes it that much more difficult for youtube et al. to ‘find’ it. Without further ado, here’s the best of the best:

The Best Movie Streaming sites on the ‘Net

You’ll require nothing more than a couple of codecs and browser plugins. Oh yeah, and a zippy broadband Internet connection. So what drives these sites to become successful? Mad advertising dollars through proper monetization - just check out those Alexa traffic ranks!

www.watch-movies.netALEXA RANK — 769

Very fast site. We like this one because it loads a desired movie on its’ own page - with multiple available sources. If one link doesn’t work, just try a different one.

http://joox.netALEXA RANK — 915

Another excellent streaming site. Joox offers movies that are hosted on www.stage6.com (a premier video site) so the playback quality is fantastic! Apparently Stage6 is shutting down on Feb. 28/08, so it’s unclear what impact this will have on Joox.

http://quicksilverscreen.comALEXA RANK — 1,399

We also recommend using the quicksilver forums to find the latest movie links.

www.movieforumz.comALEXA RANK — 1,635

Excellent site for user-submitted content. Offers a plethora of categories for perusal.

http://movie6.net/ALEXA RANK — 1,717

Great site for new content!

www.free-tv-video-online.infoALEXA RANK — 1,852

Not a bad site - they also offer multiple sources for many of their movies.

www.sidereel.comALEXA RANK — 1,892

Nice modern TV & Movie site! We recommend that you check out the links on the right and see what the moderators and top posters / link updaters are posting.

http://66stage.comALEXA RANK — 3,018

Very fast site. No popups, no external links. Stick with the movies that are listed on the right side for best results. Users can also download the movies as *.divx files.

www.movies-on-demand.tvALEXA RANK — 6,256

Well laid-out site with lots of working links.

www.tv-links.ccALEXA RANK — 6,684

Another well laid-out site with lots of working links, including television shows.

http://moviefather.com/ALEXA RANK — 11,737

Not too sure about this one - it comes with that Zango spyware.

— A much more robust list of online streaming movie and television websites can be found at www.ovguide.com.

Bookmark It:

• Date Monday, 25 Feb 08 at 11:36 am
• Under News & Others
•  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed .
• You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site .