Saturday, July 3, 2010

Why I will miss Ninjavideo

I love watching movies and TV shows online. But on July 1st, I was shocked and saddened by the news that my favorite online video streaming website, Ninjavideo.net, was shut down by the Feds. Apparently, this was a "crackdown" to stop film and TV piracy online. Since 2008, I had been a loyal visitor and fan of Ninjavideo because I was able to watch many of the latest movies and amazing TV shows like Dexter, Scrubs, Nip/Tuck, Chuck, Lost (well I stopped after season 4 because it got too confusing), Smallville (it wasn't that great but I watched it only because of Kristen Kreuk aka Lana Lang), Spartacus, and Mythbusters.

Ninjavideo became my favorite site for four reasons. First, it was FREE! There was no registration required or any other strings attached in order to access the site. Although there were some ads I had to click through before viewing videos at times, that small inconvenience was nothing as long as I was able to watch my TV shows without interruptions. I was also able to save a lot of money by watching movies there instead of in the theaters.

Second, instant high quality (i.e HD, DVD, Blu-ray) online streaming! This feature saved me a ton of gigabytes of hard drive space and saved me a lot of time downloading torrents into my computer. Before Ninjavideo, I would spend hours downloading 350MB episodes and by the time I made it through the whole season, I would have used at least 5GB of space. Multiply that by 3 seasons (average estimate per TV show) and multiply that again by 5 TV shows (average number I would keep before deleting) and after doing the math, you can see how I always ran out of hard drive space. 

Third, well organized and maintained website. Since the TV shows and movies were organized alphabetically and episodes are sorted per season, searching for a specific episode or movie was quick and easy. Also, because of Ninja's dedicated admins, the site was updated frequently and any reported bugs or broken videos were fixed within a reasonable time.

Fourth, the latest movie releases! Most new films would be in cam quality, but as time went by, I was impressed how even DVD and Blu-ray rips were eventually uploaded for maximum quality and entertainment pleasure. Seasonally, it was also fun to see movie theme packages of older movies being uploaded such as zombie movies, war movies, vampire movies, and much more.

So what's going to happen to Ninjavideo? After listening to the Ninjavideo manifesto podcast by Phara, one of the site admins, her words made me realize how capitalism and greed are causing so much social injustice and societal problems in our world today, and unfortunately, that is where piracy originated from. Ninjavideo may have been shutdown for now, but it will never die because its online community still exists all around the world. To listen to the Ninjavideo manifesto podcast click here: Part 1 Part 2.

So this blog post has been dedicated to the team at Ninjavideo. Thank you to all the admins and everyone else involved for contributing your time, money, and effort to making this such a great site... if not the best! Without you, my life wouldn't have been as fun and entertaining. I know we will see you again soon. Long live Ninja!

1 comment:

  1. You think hana will bring the site back online? Their takeing their time to come out with an official responce or a different domain like the others. They are still in their prison cells?

    NinjaVideo was a decent website and those aspects you valued most in the website, are all avaliable elsewhere. You can look at http://ovguide.com for many alternatives.

    I have one recomendation though:
    Free, No Registration required, No strings attatched, high quality (and low quality). Well orgnaisted (some say more) with categorys seo and search, updated hours after it airs, latest movie releases.
    Theirs only one place: http://re1ease.net

    ReplyDelete