Streaming...

I've been getting caught up with a few shows and having to resort to watching them on the site of the company... And some sites tend to annoy me less or more...

So which legitimate sites/companies stream via the net right?

AMC as far as quality of the stream is awesome. There are more commercials, but I don't mind them. I don't know about their back log though.

Syfy as far as quality is garbage. The pirated streams are literally better quality which is sad cuz they should always be worse...Further the back log only extends 5 episodes back so for anyone trying to catch up has to resort to pirate sources for the "current" season.


So who does streaming well in your opinion?

I don't know what sites your using, but for legitimate i would think netflix and hulu(is hulu legit idk i live in Canada and doesn't work from my country regardless).

Hulu is legit. It's a joint venture of network giants like Universal, Fox and Disney. Really something quite extraordinary--something I expected to see, but not as soon as I did. I've been using it for a couple of years. Hulu Plus offers you a larger collection of shows and movies, and deeper backlogs.

If you don't mind paying for your entertainment, there's also Amazon on Demand for shows and movies. The prices are great.

I stopped pirating entertainment a few years ago. I had promised myself from the beginning that if the corporations ever made their offerings as easy and convenient as the pirate nodes did--and stopped trying to take overzealous liberties with my personal property--then I would start playing fair with them. I stuck to my word, and pay for my entertainment now. Generally, I'm happy with the pricing of entertainment via the web, too. I've never even been a TV cable subscriber.

I am specifically not talking about pirated streams... and talking about streaming video from like Syfy, AMC, BBC, Spike, Comedy Central, etc... network/cable channel streams...

As I pointed out Syfy's stream was decent to horrendous. And i don't know what it is doing but it tries to fry my computer or something as my CPU temps sky rocket when i watch on Syfy. They have bad commercials, poor quality streams, their UI is lagtastic and doesn't work well

My question is which ones do you think are doing good and which ones are just bad.

The mention of pirate streams in the original post have to do with the comparative quality where when trying to watch a pirate stream you can have poor quality to great, but not the best...generally fewer commercials if any, but have to deal with ads... and the fact that the whole idea of having a 5 show back log is pretty dumb especially for a show like Warehouse 13 I literally watch 2 seasons on Netflix then had to go pirate s3 1-8 because there was no where else to get them. I know that a lot of you are thinking "well you can just wait" and that's true, but I'm thinking of this from the point of view of "why put a back log up if I can't access them all?" The point of a back log is to get a viewer caught up to watch the series live, but if I can't get caught up because i can't watch most of the season how can i watch live? So it's just silly to have it if you're not going to have all the eps.

I don't watch many shows on channel sites, mainly because I don't watch all that much actual TV and the series I'm watching is more catching up now and or I just can never figure out the time slots or when I do someone screws up my recording stuff *grumble* For example I love Big Bang Theory, but I've seen i think up to somewhere in season 2 because I hadn't heard about it till s2 or 3 and it clashes with some idiot's schedule of stupid stuff. So yeah... don't watch much TV or the show on their sites...this is a tangent... and that's more or less why it's in my head now... Also because i just watched Comic Book Men on AMC's site tonight and noticed how awesome it worked vs a day ago when I tried watching Warehouse 13 on Syfy's site and my computer nearly died from it...

Hulu is a last resort. Even if you pay for it, you still have to sit through commercials.

Just want to add, the big plus for me, when it comes to sites like Amazon On Demand and YouTube Movies, is that I can rent movies and shows piecemeal. I don't like to subscribe to services, because I don't watch much TV. I read books and play City of Heroes for entertainment usually.

I love watching a movie or digging my way through a season of a good show occasionally, but if I subscribed to some service like Amazon Prime Instant Video or Netflix, weeks or in some cases months might go by when I was simply throwing away money. By the way Prime Instant Video has a free month trial.

The CW isn't bad, neither is CBS and of course Hulu (ABC, Fox, NBC and their affiliates). The worst problem I have with them is the problem switching streams for the commercials and then back to the show. I've had streams die during that, requiring me to restart the episode and then try to jump back to the break were it broke to pick up where it was left off.

The BBC iPlayer is wonderful, if you can get it.

Why? It's the UK citizens who pay for that content through their taxes.

Yes but then it won't be using the BBC iPlayer but one targeting the US via their BBCA affiliate. Hulu and probably all the standard US broadcast network streams don't work in Canada.

Some people forget that these series is a product that costs a lot of money to make. That the broadcast rights to these series are sold around the world to local broadcasters who won't be all too thrilled if their customers could simply stream these episodes from the US days/weeks/months before they are broadcast there. And if people there could get the stream from the US, why would broadcasters there pay to air the series in the first place?

At least the BBC finally got it right with Doctor Who by airing the newest episodes and specials in the US via BBCA, unedited, only a few hours after they are broadcast in the UK. That probably wiped out a sizable chunk of torrent downloads while raising the ratings in the US.

But how would one collect money to fund the production of TV shows? An international pay per view streaming model? A per month fee to access all series worldwide from anywhere like an international super Hulu+?

Well localized gating of content due to local moral and social dogmas is expected, sadly.

For instance I wouldn't expect The Walking Dead to be available in mainland China (based on changes to WoW that was mandated by the Government).