angel:
There's an option for the Seezn Youtube channel which is mostly just clips for their actual shows on the Seezn app which is not listed. How can we add this?
I think, as a rule, YouTube channels (and equivalents on other platforms) are only be counted as a service in themselves if they have full episodes or movies, not samples of those on the company’s own site and/or app.
I at least think, given the number of channels, it would also be prudent to limit them to channels which have full movies and/or complete series (or are planning to), not ones which only have the first few episodes of series in other to promote the company’s own service. Though this may mean removing some that have already been approved.
For examples, the Tencent Video channel appears to host the full versions of all episodes of many series. But the WeTV English channel, after a cursory look, appear to only have the first 2 or 3 episodes of series and clips hosted on the channel itself, and either direct one to the WeTV app to see the rest or include the episodes hosted on the Tencent Video channel in playlists.
This isn’t the case for all the WeTV channels, however, as at least WeTV Korea has all the episodes of series such as Sweet First Love that WeTV English has only the first few of. The WeTV Taiwan channel also appears to have only the first few episodes of series. So, by the rule I purposed, the WeTV-branded channels (which there’s at least 10 of) will unfortunately needed to considered as services or not on a case-by-case basis. But it would mean there’d be a slightly more manageable amount of YouTube channels in the end, and there isn’t much point in linking to a service which is never going to have the full series.
It would also help to dramatically reduce the number of services needed if generic ‘Official YouTube’, ‘Official Vimeo’ and so on services were to be used not only for channels with only one series or movie, but also for those with content from only one production company (those run by TV networks, VOD services or which otherwise collect productions from various companies should be separate services, if the channel has full series/movies on it). The danger with that is that people who don’t understand the system will add links to channels which should be separate services to these generic channels, so the submissions to it would need close attention by admins.
TBH I feel separate services, Vimeo and V LIVE (which if there’s little to nothing in the way of piracy or duplicates on it could be one service for MDL’s purpose, even though the channels are run independently from each other) should be greater priorities than YouTube, as along with piracy sites it is where people are most likely to be searching for dramas anyway. It would be good to direct people to the official uploads on YouTube, but potentially more useful to direct them to official services they didn’t even know about. That’s just my thoughts, though.
A few separate services which it may take a long time before they’re added but I want to mention before I forget about them, after learning about all just recently:
dLibrary Japan – Subscription; limited to United States, Canada; subtitle availability varies. Also thanks should go to twiz for uncovering this utterly unadvertised in English service and mentioning it here.
FAREASTREAM – Subscription; limited to Italy; Italian subtitles. Part of MYmovies.it and uses the same accounts system as the rest of the site; however, I don’t feel the need to render the name as ‘FAREASTREAM (MYmovies.it)’, considering that as of now I don’t know of any other services for East Asian content hosted on the site, nor of any other way that FAREASTREAM is available.
JFF Plus – Free; limited to the 20 countries listed here; subtitle availability varies. I wouldn’t normally consider a festival a service, but as this takes place over near half a year and may become a regular occurrence over that part of the year, and will be way of seeing some much-anticipated and -discussed recent features in many countries, being able to link to it on the movie’s pages could make people consider watching them legally in this instead of pirating them.