The eGuiders sort the wheat from the chaff and pick the best videos from your favourite websites so you don’t have to.
Anyone that loves YouTube but isn’t into sifting through the vast mountains of sub-standard videos out there.
Well, these videos are the best of what’s out there, as decided by actual professionals. So yes, in theory this is all of the good with none of the bad.
As much as this is the best of YouTube, it’s not YouTube. Is the content good enough to lure the public away from the familiarity of their favourite sites?
There’s something vaguely unsettling about being told what to watch. Maybe it’s just because I’m reading George Orwell’s Big Brother for the first time, but the value propostition for eGuiders.com didn’t sit right with me at first: “We search, You watch”. eGuiders.com has assembled a formidable panel of experts that, quite literally, scour the biggest video sharing websites out there (think YouTube, Vimeo, Atom and the like) and pick out the shining diamonds in the sea of cowpats that is the video search marketplace.
“Who are these snotty nosed “experts”, anyway?” I thought to myself as I looked for the ‘About’ page on the eGuiders.com website: “Some 14 year old kids, no doubt.” I mumbled self-righteously.
Errr, not quite. As it turns out, some of the videos that I was just looking at were hand picked by reviewers like Jerry Stiller (Seinfeld actor), Jon Cassar (executive produced of 24) and John Landis (director of Blues Brothers, Animal House and the Thriller music video clip), amongst dozens of others. On paper, anyway, this is the A team.
The site itself is user friendly and features a tidy - if a little conservative - design and layout. Of course the obligatory web2.0 components are included: users can register and comment on any videos that they watch. The service is free and from the looks of it the business model is supported by direct advertising.
The videos, true to promise, are all of very high quality and there is enough variety so as that you can still exercise choice over what you want to watch. This is a real “sit back, relax and enjoy” service that takes all of the effort of searching the massive digital catacombs of YouTube for decent content.
But hang on - isn’t that the charm of YouTube and the like? The satisfaction of following a bread crumb trail right to the gingerbread house and finding that killer video all by yourself? I guess it’s diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. If you would rather be served your dinner instead of shopping for it and cooking it yourself, eGuiders could be featuring prominently in your bookmarks folder.
If you are a video junkie that can do without the baloney, then eGuiders.com will offer you a safe, engaging and quality video playlist for your entertainment.
