View it on Veoh (veoh.com)

Member Name: shroud

Product:	veoh.com
Date:	07/07/09 (172 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: often can find otherwise unavailable unlicensed content here free for the watching

Disadvantages: American broadcast shows only viewable from within the 48 contigious states

~~~~What is Veoh?~~~~

Veoh is an internet based community that shares videos. Unlike You Tube, these are not necessarily short clips, with content including TV shows and full length films. All videos available are screened regularly to ensure licensing allows for their distribution, with Veoh itself having agreements with US networks for American residents to view hit TV shows via the site as a sort of "watch again" service. It is the brainchild of Dmitry Shapiro with funding support ties to Time Warner and Michael Eisner's own Tornante Company. Using the Peer to Peer model, people can sign up and upload videos. Should licensing issues arise, video content will be removed and members may even be removed, as it is NOT a piracy peer network, though registered members may upload content without charge. Anyone can download the content, registered or not, and there is no charge.

~~~Okay, but this is NOT the US, so what can we watch?~~~

Plenty. There are many foreign films and TV shows here that have not found licensed distribution in many countries, and so are allowed on. Most of these have been fan subbed, meaning that fans have placed subtitles in their own language so that others may enjoy the shows. By far the largest group of viewing these is probably the anime fanbase, with shows such as Sailor Moon Uncut, the live action Kamen Riders and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, and various other Japanese hits findng a home here available in multilingual subtitles. Videos such as these are of course longer than five minutes, so rather than watch them in short segments or using a lot of the site's bandwidth, longer videos such as these are viewable using the site's Web Player.

~~~Web Player??~~~

Yes, the Veoh Web Player. This is a little plug in that you download (for free), After browsing the site and locating the show you wish to watch, you see a little link under the video's window that says Download to web player. Clicking this means that in just a few mere moments, your video will be on your hard drive, and watchable using the plug in. The Web player will show you the download status and your Veoh library is readily accessible via this interface so that you can see what you have at a glance. Once downloaded, you can click the play button and a new window will launch from your web browser. This window will look familiar, as the interface is very similar to that of Real Player and windows media Player, so no prior study is required to figure out how to go full screen, turn the sound up or down, and so on as it is all pretty standard.

Being a program, there are of course minimum specifications. For PC users, this basically means you have to XP with service pack 1 or later, at least a 1 Ghz processor, a bare minimum of 100 mb (preferably at least 500 mb) of free disk space for storing your videos, Adobe Flash Player 9 or later, and an internet connection of at least 1 mpbs, though 2.5 is best. The faster the connection, the better the streaming will be and the faster your downloads will finish. Macs are also supported, with similar specs as for PCs, with notable differences being that OS must be 10.4.1 or later, and Quicktime 7 or later also being required. Several browsers are also supported, from Windows Explorer to Firefox, though Google Chrome and other newbies on the block are not as yet. Full specifications can of course be gotten from the Veoh website itself, and I do recommend you have a good read to understand all the finer points as they relate to your system before installing anything.

~~~Thoughts~~~

Basically I seer this site as a legitimate way to expand our entertainment experiences, with broadcast quality video of programmes we would otherwise never get to see opening up a whole new world of viewing to us. The family filter option for users who are logged in means that most non family friendly content will get filtered out of searches, but not all, so I would advise supervising use of the site. The only downside is needing to have a large enough hard drive to store the videos, but you can of course delete after watching, which then frees up space, so it is not a big deal. All in all, while there are trade offs, a handy site for our foreign broadcast TV past and present desires.

Summary: P2P style network full of diverse content, with no legal issues