Fortunately season 2 episode 16 (s02e16) is not the end of the Nate ford and his cohorts. Leverage season one and two have scored highly on ratings and the third season has already been booked for TNT. The next 15 episodes will run on Wednesday nights at 9pm.

Not much information has been released regarding season three yet. I think it will be safe to assume the same cast will be involved and, no doubt, Leverage will leave us hungry for more of Nate’s plans.

While you wait for Leverage season 3 to arrive, you can always pick up season one on DVD and season two is due to arrive at the end of May. When watching leverage online takes too long to stream, pick up the DVD which supports the show financially as well as giving you the extra bonus features. Leverage.com also has some extras to help tide you over.

Leverage season 2 episode 16 (s02e16) Will be aired on the 24th of February. Online TV streaming sites will likely have it picked up by the 25th. Those who watch Leverage online may want to consider pacing themselves however. It’ll be a long time before you see a new Leverage episode.

Maybe consider watching your way through the second series before stream Leverage season 2 episode 16 (s02e16) just to savour the moment. As an avid Leverage fan myself, I can’t bring myself to wait. With the previous three episodes, the season finale promises not to disappoint.

meekakitty

The channel of the delightfully quirky and somewhat eccentric Tessa Violent, meekakitty is one of the most popular and well know vloggers on Youtube. She started her channel by vlogging about her career as a model and has developed a style of vlogging which is, to put it mildly, extremely energetic. Ranging from discussion on Zelda to her opinion of Twilight, meekakitty is an extremely entertaining vlogger.

pogobat/Dan Brown’s Universe

Dan Brown’s Universe, much like meekakitty, had a very humble beginning. His first video ever uploaded was a short clip of him solving a rubiks cube on a pogo stick. Now Dan manages to make his living from uploading videos to Youtube and boasts over 100,000 subscribers to his channel.

Wheezywaiter

Wheezy Waiter is another very active vlogger, with a large number of inside jokes (I love it when the coffee’s done!) which regular viewers would understand. However, even for the new viewer Wheezy Waiter offers a very enjoyable viewing experience which is still incredibly funny. Keep an eye out for Free Bagel Friday, and his new instalment of Ty the Regular Guy. Wheezy Waiter, although he doesn’t have as many subscribers as either meekakitty or Dan Brown, is still a top notch vlogger on Youtube.

http://www.kumby.com/
Kumby.com offers literally hundreds of series for streaming. The site features discussion forums, series information, movie reviews, games and a chat room. The chat room surprisingly, on a typical night, has fifty to eighty people in it at a time. The streaming of the episodes seemed to work out ok with this, but be forewarned that this site is a little bit heavy on the advertisements, yet still worth checking out.

http://www.chia-anime.com/
I really enjoyed checking out chia-anime.com. The streaming on this site was very high quality and operated without any incident. The interface was intuitive and they didn’t kill me with endless advertisements. The site offers streaming of some of the more popular Anime including Bleach, Naruto Shippuden, Shugo Chara and One Piece. The site also offers anime downloads, soundtracks, wallpapers, and flash games.

http://animeready.com/
Animeready.com is a site which is focused mainly on streaming anime, and because of that it seems to excel at it. The site offers an Anime list, movies listed by genres, and a discussion chat area. The nice thing about this site was that it was really light on the advertisements as well. The lay out of the site is very intuitive, with most of the major series within one click of the splash page.

http://www.animelime.com/
Animelime.com is perhaps the purest Anime streaming site that I have come across yet. The site has a reputation for being one of the best places to watch Anime, with being free and fast to update video links and post new material. They also seem pretty active in trying to fix broken links. Well worth some time to check out.

It is really amazing the amount of Anime material that is available for free streaming right on the web. All of the sites above provide a wealth of free content available whenever the mood strikes to check out some great anime.

The Joker Blogs

Giving a horrific insight into the mind of the Joker from the Dark Knight, the Joker Blogs is a fan-made piece of work which encompasses the Joker’s escape from Arkham and the havoc he wreaks afterwards. An amazing piece of cinematography for such a low budget, these videos are definitely worth watching if you are at all a fan of Heath Ledger’s Joker. The main actor managed to echo Ledger’s performance almost perfectly.

vlogbrothers

A project which was begun as a method for two brothers to communicate across the width of the United States, the vlogbrothers (musician Hank Green and author John Green) quickly gathered a following of people known as Nerdfighters. They are now one of the most subscribed channels on Youtube, outshining even Oprah Winfrey. The vlogbrothers are also responsible for heading The Project for Awesome, a Youtube charity event where Youtube comes together to promote charities in the weeks approaching Christmas.

Pat Condell

Crude, angry and a messenger of anti-religious dictation, Pat Condell is a man who pushes free speech as far as he can. A man who fights against religion in an extremely controversial manner, Condell has received hundreds of death threats, had a video removed temporarily from Youtube and become an internet celebrity. The voice of people against religious oppression and theocratic corruption, Pat Condell is not a man who is afraid to make his opinion known.

The Hulu site is in the vanguard of the future of entertainment, where the traditional cable/broadcast model that we are all so familiar with will be more or less done away with by technology. Hulu is just the first of what will eventually become a flood of websites offering video entertainment on demand, whenever and where ever someone would want. If for no other reason, it is worth checking out, just to see what the future may hold for this technology.

Alot of the content on Hulu comes from NBC, including some of the major NBC shows. In addition to NBC, Hulu has agreements with Fox, Warner Brothers, USA network, Sony, Universal, MGM, and some selected sports programming including the NBA and NHL.  In addition to television programming, Hulu has recently been branching out to show more movies – although a good majority of the movies available are older, they still have a pretty good variety to choose from. 

The interface to use the service is easy to navigate and clean. The picture quality was, in all my testing, always of good quality. Video is delivered in the now standard Adobe Flash Codec. Of course quality will depend quite a bit on your web connection, and broadband is most definitely recommended for this site. On slower web connections there will be some buffering of the service (pauses) while the video loads, but I didn’t encounter any of this during my testing. Operation of the service is very similar to You-Tube, and at least to me, it had a very similar feel – although with much better resolution.

The only downside that I have been able to find with this service is that it is ad supported. The programs seem to be interrupted at various times to show a few multi-second advertisements. While I don’t really mind it, as it is very similar to the way traditional TV works, I do find ads distracting. It could well be that in the future they may offer a paid subscription which would dispense with the ads, and I think that would be a welcome change if you plan to use the site heavily.

Overall I found the Hulu service to be worthwhile to check out, especially in light of the cost. While this service won’t yet replace your cable and DVD player, it might become a welcome addition to the entertainment offerings in your home.

Hulu

Hulu is perhaps the best known free movie/TV web site available. Hulu offers streaming movie and tv content which is supported by advertisers and is 100% free. In addition to offering regular movies, Hulu also offers documentaries – which can be a nice bonus to the normal movie selection. Unfortunately if you are located outside the United States, Hulu will not serve up video to you at this time.

Free Movies Online

Free Movies Online is another great free streaming movie web site. The site offers movies in such areas as; Adventure, Comedy, Drama. Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Westerns and TV shows. In addition the site also offers a section on Cartoons. Quite a bit of the offerings on this site are of the classic older movies which are now in the public domain – but still provide a good deal of entrainment in any case.

YouTube Movies

When people think of YouTube – the first thing that comes to mind is grainy cell phone video of people doing funny, sometimes stupid, things. Actually YouTube, while still offering that sort of content, has recently been branching out and has a dedicated movies section. There is allot of great content available, but some of the more notable titles include Godzilla and the Three Stooges.

AMC B Movies

If you are a fan of some great classic B movies, then you can’t go wrong by checking out the AMC B Movies website. While there isn’t allot of newer content available on the site, you cant beat some of the great b movie classics, like saga of the viking woman, or the great classic dragstrip girl. The site is totally free, but ad supported.

Crackle

A great well rounded movie site, which is lesser know, is Crackle. In addition to movies, this site also offers TV shows and some great staff picks and reviews. Crackle is a great site always worth checking out for some free entertainment.

Hidden Features On YouTube

Everyone has heard of YouTube and there are few of us who have never visited the site, or a least heard about it. The site gets a lot of bad press over violent and indecent videos that manage to slip through the net and get uploaded for all to see. There has also been controversy over copyright infringements on the site.

However, this is a truly amazing and entertaining site. It’s a great way to wile away a few hours, or to do a little research. You can watch movie clips, live music videos, cartoons, and a whole host of other things uploaded by users.

That’s not all, though. There are some advanced features and ways to use YouTube that many of us are missing out on.

The Warp Player is a kind of virtual browser that will show you related clips on mouse over and if you click on one it will be played in the middle of your screen. This is a fast way of finding something you want to watch. It’s like a preview facility.

Test Tube has four different features available in one program. You can add notes to video clips, show other people what you are currently watching and add music to video clips. (The music you add should be licensed, or copyright free, or even stuff you have written and played yourself). There is also a facility that can stream chat between users who are watching the same videos. The chat facility is excellent for those who are social animals and enjoy sharing with their friends.

YouTube feeds are RSS feeds that let you know as soon as your favourite contributor has uploaded a new video. This is quite easy to set up using the link provided on the YouTube site. Subscribe to as many feeds as you like.

You can also compile play lists of all your favourite YouTube video clips. Just follow the link below to YouTube play lists and create your list. You can even choose whether to make it shared, or private. It’s really easy to add a video to the list by clicking the tab under the video choose where you want to list it and save it. The list will be there next time you want it. It’s that easy.

The play list function is great for making a collection of music videos featuring your favourite tracks and performers. It is also good for collecting informational videos that you want to view later. The music lessons and language lessons on You Tube often come in parts so it is really useful to gather these up and save them in a play list so that you don’t have to go looking for them when ever you want to look something up.

The internet has changed how we do almost everything and now it’s about to put the nail in the coffin for the DVD.

Until recently Netflix was just another company like Blockbuster or any other movie rental company. The difference was they did it by mail rather than you actually going into the store (heaven forbid.)

Now Netflix is going for a content license which will allow them to distribute movies online. There will no longer be a need for disks and customer can simply login, select which movie they would like to watch, pay for it and stream it right to their screen.

Since this technology is becoming increasingly common in Television sets and computer game consoles, not mentioning internet piracy, soon we’ll have no need for DVDs at all. In fact studies are showing that the DVD is already in decline and BLU-ray is not the one taking its place… but internet streaming.

For as little as $8.99 a month you can watch unlimited movies and TV shows right to your television or computer. Another advantage is the absence of late fees. That alone is enough for me.

Heck, with prices and convenience that good it won’t be long before the guys selling bootleg DVDs are the only ones using DVDs at all.

Netflix has become the world’s most successful online movie rental company. With this content license the competition will really have to step up if they are to survive.
So… where do I sign up?

Equals Three is a youtube show hosted by Ray William Johnson. The show revolves around videos which go viral during the week. Ray chooses three videos and comments on each of them in turn, always with a sense of humour and sarcasm. Each episode ends with a “Comment Question of the Day”, where a single video response to the previous cideo is chosen to ask a question to the viewers. The show closes with the answers to the previous week’s question. A hilarious show which updates weekly. Definitely worth the watching.

The Philip DeFranco Show

sXephil (Philip DeFranco) has one of the most popular and successful Youtube shows of all time. Taking news and entertainment pieces and then delivering in an incredibly sarcastic manner, PhillyD runs his own website as well at PhillyD.tv. The only downside is that the show will end on November 3rd 2009, but until then it updates every day Monday to Thursday. It won’t be totally over, as Phil has said he will continue on with something different, as well as already running a personal Vlog.

KassemG

KassemG is the mastermind behind the “California On” series of interviews. Taking a certain topic to the streets, KassemG asks random strangers about the topic and records the response. Extremely funny and witty, KassemG also makes cameos in the Philip DeFranco show as does Phil in KassemG’s videos. Truly amazing stuff.

“The Hard Gravel”

Director:  Matt Moore

THE LINK TO THE FULL VIDEO:  The Hard Gravel

THE LINK TO THE MUSIC VIDEOS:  Hard Gravel Music Videos

The Hard Gravel from matt moore on Vimeo.

Loads of people worked on this film, and helped make it into the comedy that it is.  It’s like an updated, but retro version of Spinal Tap focusing on the world of early 90’s pop country music.  It also has awkward comedic elements similar to The Office and Arrested Development that flow with the interviews.  The pacing is chopped to shreds(in a good way) at points with some Tim & Eric style elements and Visual Effects usage. 

The film is structured as a TV show, The Coyote McCoy show.  Coyote McCoy is played by Joshua Jones, who also did a lot of the cinematography, but he carries the role of being crazy as hell and loving country very well.  He catalogs the story of the band The Hard Gravel as they attempt to become big in the competetive country music world, and run into their arch-enemy Chet Chestnut.  The Hard Gravel singer, Bobby Alexander used to be in a group with Chet, called Nut & Bobby.  The duo broke up after Chet became addicted to Coke and alcohol, while Bobby chose to remain drug free.  The record executive says that he’ll give Bobby a chance if he can bring the label a band. 

Bobby finds a group of strangers that form The Hard Gravel:

Bobby Alexander: Lead singer of The Hard Gravel and former member of Nut & Bobby (Sam Eidson)

James McMillan: a sexually confused druggie that drums (Matt Moore)

Gerald Lee:  The coke doing guitarist of the band that also apparently is Mexican (Sam McHugh & Mexican Guy)

Ronnie Brooks: The bassist, and proud father.  He is also a wanted bank robber (David Andrews)

The cut that is linked above is the one for school purposes, it’s 15 minutes long, which is the school limit for a finished product, but there is talk of it possibly becoming a half hour film, containing the bands music videos throughout.  I’ll keep you up to date on the newest Hard Gravel info as it comes to me.