We have covered quite a few websites and tools that stream movies and TV shows on Make Use Of.
There was Ditch Your Cable Company With Free, Legal Alternatives, 7 Excellent destinations to watch TV Shows for Free, the Interview with Top 5 Free Movie & TV Shows sites, and The only TV and Movie Websites you Need.
Even though the most popular sources have been covered, I believe there are still more to be seen, to put sources into perspective, to better harvest their potential, and to save time for quality entertainment.
In the past, TV could be quite a lonely experience, if no one shared your preference for the passive home entertainment. With the internet, TV has also changed. Fanpages, chat programs, and social networks gave people a way to express themselves, to share, and to connect. The internet brought individuals together that otherwise would never have met.
With TIOTI, short for Tape It Off The Internet, a community for TV lovers has entered the scene. TIOTI is a social media platform for television shows, with a touch of Wiki-ness, providing information, links and ways to mingle with like-minded individuals. If you have a Facebook account, you won’t need to set up a separate account with TIOTI.
| Lots of websites come and go, especially when it comes to TV show and movie websites. Being a major movie, TV show, news and documentary addict made me try lots of websites over the last couple of years. While many of those sites sucked, some of them were really good. Here are my top four websites for watching my favorite stuff online. |
Hulu is an excellent 100% legal source for TV shows and movies. If you were looking for a website where you could freely watch your favorite movies and shows online this is it. Most of the content come in pretty good quality. No ‘camrips’ here. There is also an option to watch videos in full screen mode. Plus it’s completely free, you don’t have to pay anything.
Increasingly, more and more people are turning to internet-based solutions to consume their content. Many of them are switching to solutions that hook up to televisions. I find the best solution with the most control is a Media Center PC. Some people, however, do not turn to this option due to the lack of flexibility in the Windows Media Center software. I am going to tell you about some of the best FREE Windows Media Center alternatives that I have found.
MediaPortal – MediaPortal is an open source alternative to the Windows-based Media Center software.
It seems that with the rising popularity of online digitally distributed content, the internet has become more and more saturated with streaming/downloading video services. For example, there’s Joost and Hulu, which offers shows that you can view for free from anywhere that has an internet connection. Well, Adobe has also joined in on the running with Adobe Media Player.
| For those in the US who are fans of college basketball, March Madness has arrived! Just in time, a how-to guide on allowing you to view those games (or anything else) remotely on your cell phone, at work, or anywhere else where you have an internet connection, a web browser and a media player. Total media domination is at hand! |
I really love watching documentary movies. Whether it’s a new Michael Moore movie, some 9/11 conspiracy, arrest of legendary drug cartel, life of Che Guevara, Iraq war, origins of Palestine/Israel conflict …. , most of the professionally made documentaries are quite interesting and educational. If you share this passion, here are some resources to watch documentary movies online.
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Frontline known for producing in-depth lengthy documentaries on various popular issues, leading to numerous awards (see more in Wikipedia). There are over 60 high quality documentaires on their website, with each documnetary available in different formats.
Hot on the heels of Joost is Livestation, another desktop application attempting to bring television to the PC. Not many television stations have signed up so far to the project but nevertheless it’s looking rather good at the moment.
In actual fact, the only stations you can get right now on Livestation are news channels but I don’t mind as I am a huge news junkie. When I saw that Britain’s Sky News was available, I jumped all over it!
After downloading the desktop software, I dropped down the small list of stations available :
Ditching your cable company has never been more viable than it is today. The rise of online, streaming TV shows allows you to save on one of the most expensive household bills if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of the convenience of having either a cable box or DVR. The main question you will need to ask yourself is what shows you actually enjoy watching. Several name brand shows are now available online in free, ad supported formats; if your particular shows are not available then you may be stuck with your cable company, at least for now. More and more shows are always coming online, so keep checking back to see if your favorite show is available.
Torrents are by far the most popular form of file sharing. People use them to download music, movies, software, books, games etc. In case you’re new to this then go straight to our mini tutotrial at the end of the post. As for all others, I would like to introduce you to a number of coolest torrent tools out there.
TORRENT SEARCH
(1) YouTorrent / PizzaTorrent - The only torrent search engines you will ever need. Both of them let you search for torrents on several popular torrent sources simultaneously (Mininova, The Pirate Bay, IsoHunt etc.) Search results can be sorted by various criteria, i.e. file size, number of seeds, peers and category (Pizzatorrent only).
With the abundance of TV Shows and Movie links sites nowadays it’s very easy to get lost for hours searching for the best quality version of what you want to watch. The reality of the situation is that virtually all the smaller sites get their links from the larger sites mentioned in this article. So if you want to find a new show or movie to watch online then check out the sites below.
So lets take a look at them ….
I was one of the early beta testers for Joost but at the time it first came out on a restricted beta test, it was very rudimentary and needed a lot of work done to it (it would take up to 2 minutes for an option to kick in). So initially I abandoned it as useless and decided to wait until it was improved by the Joost team. I always had high hopes for it and couldn’t wait for the day when it would be sensational. fter re-installing it today, I can tell you that that day has almost arrived.
Over the last several months, in MakeUseOf Directory posts we have mentioned several websites that let anyone freely stream popular Movies, TV shows, Cartoons and other entertainment content. While some of the websites are long gone, some got much more popular and are able to maintain an excellent job at keeping content both up-to-date and free of dead links. Check out some of the better ones below. Listed from top to less preferable ones.
Top Picks
Tv-links is very similar to recently reviewed peekvid, a website where you can freely stream popular TV shows, cartoons, anime, standup comedy shows and etc. There are 4 categories on TVLinks: tv shows, cartoons, anime and not so easily located truly impressive movies section. Aditionally, TvLinks hosts forums, where users can request new stuff, report broken links and discuss whatever series or episodes they wish
Similarly to peekvid tvlinks doesn’t host any video content directly but simply provides you with link to the file hosted by one of the video sharing monsters(youtube, dailymotion, etc). I am not sure whether anything is wrong about it, however web users are damn happy about such sites. Both of these sites are relatively new and already got quite popular.
Thanks to so called web TV aggregators now we have convenient online access to thousands real TV channels such as NBC, ABC, ESPN, BBC1 and many more, organized in categories and in some cases even ranked by users, and all completely free. These directory like websites that do nothing more then collect and organize free to access channels from tv networks, started to get quite popular. And since what’s popular belongs here I selected some of the major ones and briefly compared them below
Peekvid is a very simple website where you can watch lots of popular video content like TV shows, cartoons, movies and more. There is a little you can do here, you won’t see any register, search, my account or even contact links, actually the only thing you can do is browse down through categories and watch whatever is there. Any video you see on peekvid is either from Youtube or some other video sharing website. So all that Peekvid does: it finds and categorizes all popular video for you. For instance, If I browse down to Cartoons/Simpsons category I get most of the Simpsons episodes that were uploaded to one or the other video sharing site.
