Video Sphere

TV Links is a website streaming lots of videos you can watch and enjoy just from a mouse click. “Better than a remote control” claims the video site. For sure, it’s much more convivial to select the video of your very own choice from the TV Links interface:

Videos are organized by category (tv shows, cartoons, anime, movies, music videos, sport) and alphabetical order, making it very easy to find the exact video or tv show you like.

Hosting & Downloading:

Videos seem to be hosted by Veoh, a company providing hosting services and applications for collecting, publishing, and watching a vast selection of HD-quality video programming.

Nevertheless it is not possible to download videos (well, it’s not supposed to be possible and it’s at least not supported by TV Links as explained in the FAQ).

And the very best is that everything is free…yes but…

But let’s pop the question everyone has in mind: is it legal ?

TV links claims that they provide links, and that nothing is wrong with that. Nevertheless hosting and streaming copyrighted contents without authorization is barely or even not legal at all in a lot of countries.

Disclaimer:

So it’s up to you to decide, but Video Sphere does not recommend to watch copyrighted videos if you don’t have the right to do it ! We are not responsible for illegal usage you could have with this website. Remember that without revenues, one day or another the tv and film industry could stop financing talented people…

At least, TV Links shows the way for future legal services.

(via the Daria blog)

If you’re passionate about Fly Fishing, Hook.TV is your website.

The Hook TV community was created so you can view and share professional Fly Fishing videos or create and share your own personal videos.

The core of Hook TV platform, is an interactive user generated broadband TV channel that hooks up outfitters, guides and consumers, with professional and user generated content as well as up-to-the-minute news, information, products, travel tips, lodge booking, and e-commerce shopping opportunities.

But, more important than that, Hook.tv gathers every feature to make it a real successful web video community: you can register to specific user channels, add you very own content by uploading your videos and embed them into your website or blog, add tags, …

Most video file format are accepted: AVI, FLV, MP4, WMV, MOV and MPG.

Are you a happy fisherman ? So don’t wait and register immediately !

Other example of niche video community: Zapiks: the YouTube of extreme sports.

Zapiks is a YouTube like video site dedicated to extreme sports, where passionate snowboarders, skiers, surfers, bikers, skateboarders but also brands can store and share pictures and videos.

Compared to big video sites such as YouTube or DailyMotion, it has the huge advantage to focus only on extreme sports action!

Of course everything is free. You just need to register to create your account and then start uploading, and commenting other people’s material.

Note that Zapiks is available both in French (http://www.zapiks.fr) and English (http://www.zapiks.com) !

Vidmeter gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos, by tracking and ranking those videos across 11 major video sharing networks.

Vidmeter’s resulting list of video provides a great tool for industry watchers to track trends in online videos, for marketers to see what’s hot, for makers and advertisers to track their video’s popularity, and for eager video watchers to get their fill of the most poplar entertainment online.

While it is impossible to tell the exact number of views a given video has received from every website and every download, Vidmeter gathers the reported view count from a large cross-section of web-based video sites, giving a very close indicator to the relative popularity of a video.

The ranking is performed in 4 simple steps:

1) The numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos are recorded once per hour.

2) Statistics from multiple websites but for similar videos are merged, allowing to count the views of a video on all websites as a single video, giving a more accurate ranking of a video’s popularity and not just a URL’s popularity.

3) Vidmeter automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day’s view total and the previous day’s view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest.

4)The latest view and comment counts are set as the “all time” counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

There are so many options proposed on each page, that most people does not even know about everything.

With more features to be added soon (see previous article about YouTube Remixer & AudioSwap), the user interface could be more and more complicated, and the overall ergonomics has to be improved.

But things could change rapidly with a new way of displaying pages, more ergonomic. For the moment, this new display format is only available through a small button in the top of the right menu:

Changes are not as impressive as we could expect, but remember that this new display is under beta test and that ergonomic added values are not always visible. It’s rather the experience that user are having than the design itself. Indeed, the new organization of pages seems to be more effective.

Related & Promoted videos (left: old version / right: new version)

Old version:

New version: