Video Sites

I signed up with Netflix back in December when I bought a Logitech Review. It runs $10 a month and provides shows over the internet as well as one DVD at a time through the mail. Sometime later I heard that Amazon Prime was also offering videos over the internet. We had already signed up for the Prime service, so that was like a free bonus. Maybe we don't need Netflix anymore.

The we discovered The Closer, and we have been watching several episodes a week. It has been on the air for several years, so there are a bunch of episodes out there. For a while we were getting enough from Verizon's TV service to keep us entertained, but then basketball season for the Trailblazers ended, and we needed more! It turns out that neither Netflix nor Amazon offer old episodes of The Closer over the net. We could get old episodes on DVD from Netflix, but that would require planning ahead, so I went poking around on the net to see what I could find.

I found something called Sidereel, that apparently keeps track of shows and provides links to where you can find the shows. Old episodes of The Closer are available from iTunes and from Amazon, for a price. Individually they aren't much, a couple of bucks maybe, but if you are consuming 20 or 30 videos a month, that can add up. So let's see what other links there are. Oh, look, there's a whole bunch of free links. Most of them connect to to something called Megavideo. I've tried some of the other free links as well, and they also seem to lead to Megavideo. This is kind of weird. I have heard of iTunes and Amazon, but I have never heard of Megavideo outside of my computer screen. Whatever. In any case, we can watch old episodes of The Closer off of the Megavideo web site. Well, we can watch one episode at a time. Try to watch two in a row and you run into a time limit and the video stops.

So now I'm thinking of signing up with Megavideo. The price is only ten dollars, oh wait, that isn't a dollar sign, what is it? Is that a Euro sign? It is and ten Euros translates to around fifteen dollars. Where is this company based? Hmm, doesn't seem to be based anywhere. It only exists in cyber-space. So why would they choose the Euro over the dollar? Probably because they are infidels. In any case, with the proliferation of server farms, you would not actually need to have your own hardware, no matter how much storage you need. You would need some office space for programmers, accountants and marketeers, and that's about it. You could be located anywhere.

So now all I need is a new box to connect my TV to the internet, and I should be able to get shut of Frontier's overpriced TV package. I could probably cancel Netflix as well, but my kids seem to be using it, so maybe I'll let that one continue.

There is the problem of legality. Since Megavideo is nominally a video sharing site, the holders of The Closer's copyright could ask that the videos be taken down, so I would have signed up for nothing. There is another weird thing, and that is for every episode of The Closer, Sidereel lists a dozen or so different links to different videos on Megavideo. How does Sidereel know where all those videos are? Megavideo doesn't seem to keep track. They have a search function, but it is very rudimentary. Do we have a bunch of pirates out there uploading TV shows and movies to Megavideo, and then posting the links on Sidereel? Seems like a lot of work for not much payback. Could Sidereel have a search engine can automatically determine the name of a video posted on the net? If they had such a capability, I would think the copyright holders (or their agents) would likewise be running such a search. Or are the episodes we are watching so old that the copyright holders don't care? Something is not quite right here, and I don't know what it is.

P.S. While I was poking around I came across a web site that had been seized by Homeland Security. How weird is that?

Update April 2016 replace missing picture. Added link to Amazon.