Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 1:59 PM PT

 

Where to Find Good Video: SideReel

Watching your favorite TV shows online isn’t as easy as we’d like to believe. TV content is scattered across various sites and in different, competing formats. Video search doesn’t yield relevant results consistently. And sure, BitTorrent has everything under the sun, but BitTorrent isn’t easy for everyone to use (that sound you hear is an armada of nerds firing up their keyboards to contradict me).

screenshot13.jpegSo what’s a viewer to do? Check out SideReel.com, a wiki-style video search site.

Founded in January of this year by two former Guba execs, SideReel wants to be the conduit to your favorite TV shows and other content.

SideReel just lists links to find content, so it is distributor neutral. Heroes disappears off iTunes and goes to Amazon? SideReel just changes the link.

To find what you want, SideReel believes that people are more powerful than the algorithm. With that in mind, what separates it from video search sites like Truveo and blinkx is that it uses its community to deliver relevant results, as rabid fans keep the site’s info and links up-to-date. To be sure, the site’s traffic does not yet impress; daily visitors currently number in the “tens of thousands.

In an effort to compare sites, I recently tried searching for Battlestar Galactica. Both Truveo and blinkx came back with trailers and commercial clips, while SideReel, after asking if I want the 1978 version or the modern version of the sci-fi story, provided me with a list of places where I could watch full episodes of the series streamed online, or buy them off iTunes and Amazon.

SideReel links to some suspect sources for content. I watched an episode of Battlestar that was in English, complete with the Sci-Fi Channel logo, but with Chinese subtitles. SideReel says that it can’t proactively monitor content on the site — and because it’s a wiki, copyright holders can quickly remove content if they want. But that might be too cute by a half. No matter how they do it, SideReel is still asking others to police its site.

But if you’re ambivalent about shady content sources, why not just use BitTorrent, you say? You can find anything there. True, you can use a BitTorrent tracker to find TV shows quickly, but you still need to download a client — a prohibitive task for the less tech-savvy among us.

SideReel isn’t alone in this space, with competitors coming up like LocateTV (now in private beta). But SideReel’s still a good option for the average joe who simply wants to watch TV online.

Other posts in the “Where to Find Good Video” series: StumbleUpon, Digg, Megite and Tailrank, Divvio, Mesmo.tv, Vadver.

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Comments & Trackbacks

  1. [...] by Carolyn Pritchard Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 4:00 PM PT | No comments NewTeeVee: Not a geek, but just an Average Joe who wants to watch TV online? Skip BitTorrent and all the [...]

    GigaNET Headlines…Tuesday « GigaOM on September 11th, 2007 at 4:00 pm - Permalink

  2. [...] NewTeeVee: Not a geek, but just an Average Joe who wants to watch TV online? Skip BitTorrent and all the others and go to SideReel. [...]

    GigaNET Headlines…Tuesday on September 11th, 2007 at 9:25 pm - Permalink

  3. [...] sites de partage vidéos. Que faire? Allez sur SideReel.com, un site de recherche Wiki, dont NewTeeVee a récemment fait l’éloge. Partant du principe que les fans assidus sont plus performants [...]

    Les Quotidiennes - Où trouver les séries télé sur Internet on September 13th, 2007 at 11:34 pm - Permalink

  4. [...] the only one trying to reinvent the TV guide in the age of the Internet. Sidereel launched with a similar concept this spring, Locate TV just opened up today, offering its users a more Google-like experience, and [...]

    TIOTI To Launch Tuesday « NewTeeVee on October 1st, 2007 at 4:01 pm - Permalink

  5. In the list of upcoming competitors, there is also Zeboudoir.com. Both are human-powered aggregators.

    Nuno on October 11th, 2007 at 4:52 am - Permalink

  6. How about you go to:

    http://www.tvduck.com

    if you want to watch free tv shows online !
    AND
    MOVIES

    Have you been quacked ?

    Alex on March 22nd, 2008 at 11:41 pm - Permalink

  7. lol……..they all suck

    fauxgentleman on June 15th, 2008 at 8:02 pm - Permalink

  8. There’s another nice one: http://www.cyfe.com/addon.php?aoid=5&a=index

    Bob on July 20th, 2008 at 8:50 pm - Permalink

  9. hi,

    i strongly suggest sidereel, show links tv, and tv links.

    cheers

    myfavtvshows.com on September 19th, 2008 at 7:36 pm - Permalink

  10. This site has a bunch of new release movies and tv shows http://www.videofast.info

    kelly on October 30th, 2008 at 4:06 pm - Permalink

  11. Also check out http://watch-tv-shows.tv for all new tv-shows,its as good as sidereel

    Watch Tv Shows on November 16th, 2008 at 6:50 am - Permalink

  12. I think sidereel has been slowley going down the toilet. If you look at their alexa rank its been slowly going down. I personally think they push their aff links too much and esp now that they have moved links to other people sites into a “search engine”

    Scott on March 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm - Permalink

  13. This site also is nice – http://foitv.com

    john_smith on May 4th, 2009 at 8:25 am - Permalink

  14. [...] Where to Find Good Video SideReel Posted by root 2 hours 26 minutes ago (http://newteevee.com) True you can use a bittorrent tracker to find tv shows quickly but you still need to there is also zeboudoir com both are human powered aggregators if your comment doesn 39 t show up immediately it may have gotten caught in our marketing consulting by acs Discuss  |  Bury |  News | Where to Find Good Video SideReel [...]

    Where to Find Good Video SideReel | Wood TV Stand on May 31st, 2009 at 4:50 pm - Permalink

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