WatchUWant.TV Review | Pandora & LastFm of Streaming Online Video?

Posted in: Video Search Engines by RobM on February 8, 2010

watchuwant

WatchUWant.tv offers an endless stream of videos to watch, based on your search criteria, and functions in a manner similar to streaming radio sites like Pandora and LastFm.

What is WatchUWant?

From their site, WatchUWant describes the internet as being a new infinite number of videos, but states that its site “automatically separates the wheat from the chaff, recommends new and interesting content, and moreover, tailors its selection to you.”

Sounds interesting enough, but does it work?

Getting Started

What’s interesting about WatchUWant is that there are NO user accounts. You just open the site and jump right in. And while this is nice to just get started, without user accounts, how are your interests and selections saved?

Anyhow, I ran a few searches, and there are some Pandora similarities, but as I’ll explain, there are also a number of notable differences as well.

Viewing Related Videos

My first search was for composer “John Williams”, so I entered these terms and started searching. Right away, I was presented with a number of related and semi-related clips on YouTube.

But what’s odd is that you can’t really rate the videos, but rather, if you don’t like it, you just click ‘Next’. So my question would be, what if you LIKE the clip, but just want to skip it for now? And what if you want to ban a clip you strongly disliked?

Strange and Somewhat Irksome Lack of User Accounts

Most puzzling is, unlike Pandora, you don’t have user accounts to remember what you’ve seen and rated, so in a frustrating way you have to reinvent the wheel every time you visit WatchUWant. I’m not crazy about that, as there were plenty of results from my searches that I definitely did NOT want to view again.

One of the nice things about having accounts with Pandora and LastFm is not just the ability to create accounts that retain personal interests, but also having the ability to share stations with friends and other folks. You can’t do that here, which is disappointing as well.

Following the Trends of WatchUWant

WatchUWant also offers a tab for seeing the current viewing ‘Trends’, or searches that are currently popular with WatchUWant users. Nothing really earth-shaking here, other than spring-boards for viewing currently popular topics.

Again, this would be more interesting to me if these were individually-rated accounts, but instead these just appear to be streaming channels of videos on certain topics.

A Notable Positive…

There are a few noteworthy positives to this system, though, that I think are worth pointing out. First is that, if you want to use WatchUWant as a radio player for music, you could pick a musician or band you like, kick off the station, then work on something else in another browser tab.

WatchUWant will continually stream content non-stop, so if you want to listen to video content like a radio, this is a nice option. The player will just endlessly stream related content based on your search without stopping.

Another Positive

Another thing notable about WatchUWant is that the site/player is VERY open and uncluttered. It’s a minimalistic player with no comments, ratings and other clutter, so if all you want is streaming video watching and nothing else, this is an ideal system.

Being able to use a back arrow to the previous film also makes this a notch better than Pandora and LastFm, both of which systems do not let you jump to a previous song.

Maybe with addition of user accounts this could be an ideal system in which one can rate films and retain these ratings for future viewing.