If I want to watch a full episodes of one of many TV shows, the only way to do it is sidereeel. com or yidio. com or binkx or one of these sites. They always say you just have to fill out a survey to watch these shows. Is this kind of a scam? How do these work?
I dunno – I download from torrent sites that are probably illegal. But if you want to PM me, I’ll tell you.
Thanks but I’m looking for legal and streaming online.
I don’t know if I’d call it a scam, but they generally do not have the rights to the shows. And the surveys are legitimate surveys: check out cpalead.com. But that doesn’t mean the site itself is reputable.
It’s really only a scam though if they claim to have the show legally. Usually they have the same standard disclaimers that say that they are just aggregating the content, or are hosting it in good faith and would remove it upon request.
There are also some sites that have surveys but no content, but I haven’t run into them in a while. Then again, there are sites that have the content without the surveys–usually hosted in other countries.
On the few I’ve tried, they are collecting a lot of personal information that I did not want to give out. So, I gave them a fake name and used a spam catcher e-mail address that I have. They say that they will not sell your personal information, but it didn’t take long before my spam catcher started receiving all kinds of spam addressed to Heywood Jablome of 1234 Fifth Street (the fake name that I had used).
I don’t know if they have the content legally or not, but the main purpose of the sites is definitely to harvest e-mail addresses and other personal info.
Try Google TV. The link is just for what it does with multimedia content. There’s much more.
If it’s on a US TV network, you can almost always see the show on the network’s website the day after the show airs. They don’t put up all the shows, but it’s a good way to see one if you’ve missed it.
Hulu.com has recent episodes of many shows, too, as well as episodes of older ones. Again, not every show is represented.
They’re not exactly scams, at least not directly, but they’re hardly above board either.
The only reason may of these sites exist is to get you to fill in the survey, which might earn the site a few cents or a few dollars depending. The content - TV shows or porn or blog posts or software or how-to articles or whatever it is this week - is all either stolen or purchased very cheaply from sources who specialize in producing cheap content for fake web sites.
The person paying for the survey entries probably doesn’t know about or approve of these sites. That’s the scam: the web sites operators are typically running ads and surveys in ways that violate the terms of the ad and survey networks. They spam and use every trick in the book to try to make a few quick bucks before the networks find out and cut them off.
Ever see pushy web sites advertising “get free traffic”, “lead generation”, “buy my free e-book to learn how to make a million dollars on the internet” and the like? This is the sort of scheme they teach if you buy in.
Great post by tellyworth, but I’ll add two things:
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they’re not stealing or buying cheap video content. They’re just pointing to content that already exists on other sites, or maybe to nothing at all. Their goal is to capture search engine traffic and hope that people will jump through hopes for a payoff. There is no payoff.
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they aren’t conducting actual surveys, they’re just trolling for personal info which is used to build mailing lists