Well, no. Everything isn’t free.
Some videos are free to watch and free to download. Some are free, but have commercials interspersed. Some you can download for free, but can’t watch online. Then there’s another category of paid subscription or pay-per-view, premium class online video services. Don’t expect to find first-run Hollywood movies for free online anytime soon. It’s not in their nature to just give it away.
Let’s skip those for now, and just concentrate on what IS free to watch, and possibly free to download. There’s a lot of that available.
Some of those will be pornography sites, so be warned.
SEARCHING FOR THE BEST FREE ONLINE VIDEO SITES
Because there is so much video available on the Internet, zeroing in on what you want can seem daunting at first. We’ll try to smooth out that process by suggesting some of the more popular sites that let you watch videos for free online. From there, you’ll have a jumping off point to discover even more of what the Internet has to offer.
It’s A Video World
Once you find free videos online, use RealPlayer to download them to your computer and watch them any time. Simply hover over the top right corner of the video as it’s playing and click on the Download This Video option.
One obvious technique is to type “free videos” into your search engine and see what comes up. You’ll literally get hundreds of millions of hits. Most search engines have a specific Videos category to refine the pursuit, but you’re still faced with an overwhelming amount of choices.
A streamlined version of that tactic is to look at aggregators of video resources. OVGuide, GigantiCo and MeFeedia are three of the more popular online video guides. They either break the content down to categories with links to specific websites, or actually play the videos on their website.
Although not quite the same aggregator model, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Google has their version of video search. Google Videos is a reasonable way to track down free videos on specific subjects from a variety of sources. Of course a good many of those leads point to a particular website.
THE EIGHT HUNDRED POUND GORILLA
That of course is YouTube, owned by Google. When the subject is watching free videos online, they simply can’t be avoided. It’s difficult to report up to the minute usage statistics, but without a doubt they are the largest online video website by a factor of three.
YouTube started by offering a simple way for individuals to upload their own homemade videos so anyone in the world can watch for free. The value of some of that content is sometimes questionable, but that’s the freedom the Internet offers, and it shouldn’t be any other way.
As a caution, you should also understand that some video content might not have all the legal rights and clearances required. This is especially important if your intent is to both watch and download.
YouTube has since grown to the point of developing its own channels for original productions, and has partnerships with several major Hollywood studios to provide streaming movies. Whether these will be free or some pay per view or subscription plan remains to be seen.
EVERY KIND OF VIDEO CONTENT IS AVAILABLE
The subject matter you’re looking for obviously has a bearing on the kind of website to search for. Luckily most of the top free video websites carry a wide range of topics, broken into categories that make is easy for you to find what you want.
Entertainment in the form of movies, television programs, music video is something we just can’t get enough of. Happy to oblige because user traffic is what advertisers want to see, several good sites provide this content for free viewing. Downloading is a different matter, and each has policies or technical barriers about that.
Before moving on with the more entertainment-oriented, general web sites, I want to mention Khan Academy. It’s definitely on the scholarly side, containing a truly vast array of academic and professional subject matter. All free to watch and download.
GENERAL-PURPOSE WEBSITES TO WATCH VIDEOS FOR FREE
I’m using the term general-purpose because these sites cover so much territory when it comes to content.Dailymotion is one. It carries what have become the standard set content categories: movie trailers, TV clips, music video, sports, games, news, celebrities, technology and even anime.