Net Video / Chart / Clicker

From its origins in the early 1990's, Internet-delivered video has now become a major form of entertainment. Today, amateur and professionally-made films, television shows, clips, segments, news reports, documentaries, skits, comedy, slice-of-life reality, user-made videos, live streams--and more--are provided for viewing online. This page presents a discussion of videos available online. For a chart summarizing this information, see the Net Video Chart; for a compact table of links, see the Net Video Clicker.

The problem today is not finding video to watch, but locating video that interests you that is of sufficient quality to spend your time watching. Also, it is a challenge to find video presented with a stable, usable technical implementation, a cogent editorial context, and with a clear user interface that supports your viewing experience reliably. Web sites present video in a variety of ways, and I describe them here in three categories:

1. Video Hosting Sites. These sites host videos that you can watch on the site (streaming) or download for viewing later. I call these "video hosting sites" because they store videos produced by one or more organizations (TV networks, for example) and make them available for viewing.
2. Video Guide Sites Guide or directory sites don't host videos, but help you locate videos that might be hosted elsewhere. These sites may be organized around a simple annotated directory, index, or search feature. The value of this type of site is the information organization and editorial intelligence that goes into guiding you to videos of interest.
3. Video Mix Sites This type of site is a mishmash of user-contributed, hosted, and hosted-elsewhere content. These sites ofen have a confusing purpose, content, organizational scheme, and user interface. Part hosting site, and part guide site, part advertising site, they seem to exist just to show just random videos, commercials, or promotions for movies or musical acts.

For the most part, online videos are free to watch. Some sites offer subscription-based viewing, videos for sale, excerpts of videos for sale, or clips of videos from cable or broadcast television. In most cases, videos will play in your Web browser (or in a pop-up window), but in some cases a specialized viewer is required. Many sites show advertisements in the videos or have advertisements on their Web pages in order to gain revenue to cover the cost of the site and turn a profit if possible.

Video Hosting Sites

These sites host videos that have been contributed by users or video owners. Highlights of these sites include full movies, tv shows, and documentaries. The value of these sites include, for the most part, stable technical implementation, so that when you find a video to watch, it usually plays. Most of these sites integrate advertising into the videos, although some offer subscription-based (or rental) viewing options. The basic problem with some of these sites is that they can be poorly organized: a wide mish-mash of videos of all kinds of videos are sometimes thrown together in a confusing interface with often poor (or non-existent) tools to be selective about what to watch. Perhaps because many hosting sites now have their origins in broadcast or cable television, they are using the same model of throwing content at the user without giving the user too many tools to be picky about what to watch.

• hulu: Hulu has a large, growing, well-organized, and easy-to-use collection of professionaly-produced video of all kinds. The videos play in your Web browser, so you don't need separate client software, or you can choose a pop-up version of the video to watch in a window outside of your browser. The site's organization allows you to find videos in the TV or Movies categories which are browsable and searchable. You can look, for example, at the list of Movies according to an alphabetical order listing or look at genres in what are termed channels (Action and Adventure, Animation and Cartoons, Comedy, Drama, Family, Food and Leisure, etc.) The full-episode shows or movies are clearly marked (versus some clips or excerpts on the site). The videos have full titles and are described clearly, including capsule descriptions of episodes of TV series. Highlights include classic shows like "Dragnet" and "The Bob Newhart Show" and feature films like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Overall, Hulu has shown the way in creaing a high-quality site for viewing videos online. Its primary strength is its quality content presented with simple, clear, cogent navigation--it is easy to find what you want to watch, and when you find it, it is worth watching.
• Google Video: Google's video collection is a mix of video types from a wide variety of sources. It includes the Google-owned You Tube site. The search feature locates videos at many other video hosting sites. The videos play in your Web browser, so you don't need separate client software. The weakness of this site is that the mix of content and sources here means that you may have to spend time seeking out quality clips--that is, finding professionally-produced programs versus amateur clips or short excerpts. Editors at google have been reducing the utility of the interface and making it harder and more awkward to find videos of interest. There is no system for locating, for example, just professionally-produced full movies or espisodes of a series. However, the depth and breadth of this site and makes it a definite stop in online viewing.
• AOL Video: here you can watch a variety of videos from television shows including old ones ("Bob Newhart," "Lost in Space") and new ones. The site includes some videos from the Hulu site as well video from other Channels such as ABC, CBS, CNN, Classic WB TV, Comedy Central, etc. The site suffers from its organizational pattern, which is oriented towards the content brands (CBS, ABC, Comedy Central, etc) versus the content (I want to watch, for example, classic TV shows from the 1960's--where are they?). The site suffers from a poor design with a confusing mishmash of links to other AOL services that you don't necessarily want (AOL Mail, Winamp Toolbar). This lack of coherence makes it difficult to locate videos. Videos start on pages immediately, so that while you are looking for, example, the full episodes of "Gilligan's Island," another (unrelated) video comes up and starts playing. The site does a poor job to differentiate between full-length epsiodes versus clips.
• Joost: Joost hosts a range of TV and film. You can watch the videos in the browser window (as opposed to the horrible client software in Joost's beta release). However, this site remains difficult to use and browse. It is difficult to discern what videos are clips and what are full episodes. Many videos are mis-categorized (for example, by selecting the Film category, I find instead episodes of cable tv shows (or clips? I can't tell). This site's overall design is so confusing, jumbled, and non-sensical that I find it a pain to use. It is difficult to browse by title of show (the hidden secret is that the "channels" label reveals a listing where you can see what series are available for viewing). Joost shows a stubborn desire to tire out and confuse the viewer with overly-complex navigation features and obscure labels and terms. Just to confuse the user more, there are directories of people and groups that link to videos that waste your time even more. This site does have some good content (e.g., National Geographic specials), if you can find it. The wide range of professionally-produced content make this a site worth visiting.
• ResearchChannel: a consortium of leading research and academic institutions share research work on a range of topics: arts, science, education, health, and medicine.
• Television Networks: major television networks offering videos on demand:
  ABC
  C-SPAN
  CBS
  CNN
  FOX
  MSN
  NBC
  PBS
  A&E
  The WB
  NFB
  TV Land
  Crackle
• Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive: library of free movies, films, and videos; digital movies ranging from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to videos of every genre uploaded by Internet Archive users
• Teachers TV: hosts videos for school teachers; covers every subject in the curriculum, all key stages and every professional role – from teaching assistant to headteacher
• LikeTelevision: this site presents classic tv and movies, cartoons, and classic commercials. The site is a demonstration of The Broadband Media Network, a company that provides video applications over public (Internet) and private networks. The site's simple, unsophisticated interface makes it fairly easy to use, but the content is fairly limited, given the demonstration purpose of the site.
• Factual TV: hosts documentaries and educational-type programs

Video Guide Sites

These sites guide you to videos of interest based on a directory, index, and/or a search feature. They do not host videos, but link to online sources where the videos are hosted. These video guide sites flourish because so many video hosting sites are so poorly organized and difficult to use. These guide sites often provide a clear, coherent, simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-understand way to find videos from multiple sites. The problem with these guide sites is that they sometimes link to unreliable, flaky, or unstable video hosting sites.

Another problem with guide sites has to do with copyright. Official sites (such as the Hosting Sites (listed above for TV networks, for example)) contain videos that are OK to view online according to the hosting sites use terms because the copyright owner has given permission. Other works, for which the copyright has expired or which has fallen into the public domain, and are also OK to view online. Many guide sites link to these legal or public domain content sources. However, there are some guide sites that link to sites hosted on servers in countries where copyright laws are not enforced. I've removed references in my list here to sites where I believe links are not made respecting copyright law. Let me know if I've missed anything: please send a correction.

• Spreety: links to original sources of quality, legal entertainment choices, including the top new TV shows, classic shows, music videos, news, sports, movies, and more
• FanCast
• Veoh
• John Locker: a well-organized interface to online videos. Categorized and summarized. Accepts user contributed links. The name of the site comes from 17th-century philosopher John Locke, and the stated aim of the site is to help people locate educational videos and encounter interesting and new ideas.
• Movies Found Online: organizes links to free movies and shows. Highlights include an extensive collection of documentaries.
• Documentary Log
• Documentary Wire
• Classic Cinema Online: a well-prepared directory of classic movies in a range of categories. Good selectivity and handy Internet Movie Database links for the titles make it easy to find good, classic movies to watch.
• TV Guide's Online Video Guide: TV Guide's picks for paid videos, videos for sale, some clips, short videos, excerpts, and portions of longer videos, and popular videos or videos that are being promoted as advertisements for tv shows or movies; difficult to use and cluttered interface
• EarthCam: see live views all over
• Video Surf: a search engine that checks a variety of video hosting sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Video, Metacafe, and many more, for videos.
• gawkk: share your video picks
• Public Libraries: if you are seeking to watch a movie or series on DVD or tape, you might try to see if you can borrow it from your local public library. Some libraries also provide their patrons with access to online streaming video. Check your local library.

Video Mix Sites

These sites that present an amalgam of clips, user-contributed videos, trailers, viral videos, music videos, home videos, advertisements, promotions for movies or tv shows. These sites typically provide users a way to browse, sort, rank, or comment on the videos, but almost are universally very difficult to use because of the lack of organization of the videos by criteria such as professional versus amateur, excerpt versus full program, genre, title, description, length, year produced, etc.

• Viral Video Chart: save a lot of time by watching the videos that everyone else is viewing
• Yahoo! Video
• Daily Motion
• MySpace Video
• Viddler
• Heavy
• Spike
• break
• vimeo
• Guba
• metacafe

Reference Links

• dmoz.org Arts: Video
• Answers.com video
• The Public-Domain Movie Database
• Public Domain Information Project

What I'm Looking For

Today, the novelty of online video has long worn off--users no longer should be thrilled to wade through massive collections of unorganized videos to find something to watch just for the sake of watching something online. Instead, today's online video viewer should be discerning and find exactly what he or she wants. Therefore, when I'm looking at video sites, I want to find clear, coherent, understandable navigation features that allow me to browse (look at what they have and see if anything interests me) or search (look for videos with specific keywords or characteristics) on a variety of criteria, including:

• Excerpt or full video: is the video just a clip, or is it the entire video, movie, or tv show?
• Professional or amateur: is the video professionally-produced or is it user-contributed? I am not implying that user-contributed clips cannot be entertaining and interesting, but I might want to make this distinction in my search.
• Creator: who made the video? For example, I might want to limit my search to a creative person making viral videos or a particular TV network.
• Copyright holder and status: one of the difficulties in verifying if a video is online legally is identifying the copyright holder. Who is the holder, and has that holder given permission for the display of the work? Or is the video public domain? Or has the copyright expired?
• Labels: a simple set of labels using easy-to-understand terms for genres of videos like: comedy, drama, science fiction, news, documentary, sports, music, amateur, etc. can make browsing for videos much easier; calling these categories "channels" or "tags" is fine, but it should be clear to the user how to use these labels to locate videos
• Year of production: the year of production can help identify the styles and sensibility at a time in our culture. For example, videos made in the old days of 2004 have a particular style that might interest me. Or I might like to see a list of movies made before 1960, or tv series of the 1970's.
• Full title: the title of the video can be key to identifying something of interest, yet some sites abbreviate the title or use cryptic file names instead.
• Description: a short, capsule summary of the video contents can go a long way to search and identify what to watch. Many sites lack even a cogent one-sentence summary of videos.
• User rating: this is somewhat useful for identifying videos of merit. Many sites already provide this, but it is not as useful as the above criteria.
• Video characteristics: most sites already have search critieria for video length, date posted, times viewed, etc. These are useful, but not sufficient to help a discerning viewer who may be more interested in the content of the video itself.

All of these criteria require professional editors and information organizers to work diligently to categorize and annotate videos. Many video hosting sites ignore these issues and instead focus soley on the technical setup and marketing of their videos--leaving their viewers to fend for themselves to find videos of interest.

Is something missing or incorrect? Please send a correction.