Sites

Internet Movie Database

The wealth of information at IMDB on movies and all personnel involved in movies and TV is unbelievable. Be sure to include this site in any research in this area.
The site also can be used for current and upcoming movie reviews. Their search engine is one good place to start: all you need is part of a name or title. Some will enjoy checking out who shares your birthday.

You Tube

Now that I have a broadband connection, I can visit YouTube. What a site!!! I am not interested in all the personal videos. I go there to see the performances of well-known singers and comedians. This is great. You can set up your favorites lists to make it a easier to return to the ones you like. And it's not just recent performances. I guess people have videotaped performances from several years ago, or even TV. Thanks everyone.
And my son's band is there too.

Besides for visiting this site, there are programs to download the videos and to extract the music and convert to other formats, like MP3. Here's how I do it: Go to YouTube Downloader and enter the address of the page with the video (copy and paste it from the address line). A link will appear that says 'Get Download URL'. Click on that and it will start downloading the video to your PC. Change the name of the file that is downloaded to one that you want, with an FLV extension. That is the type of file that these videos are. You can play the video with an FLV player (I use the free nFLV Player .
A note on trying to use the nFLV Player: you might get an error in starting it, that you need to get flash software from Adobe. If you already have flash, and still get this error, you might have to fake it out. Go to your system32 directory in your windows directory and then into the macromed and then flash directory (C:\windows\system32\macromed\flash). In there is a flash?.ocx file. For instance, mine is flash9d.ocx. Make a copy of it, and rename the copy to flash8.ocx. Now you should not have that error any more.

On the other hand, I also want to extract the sound (music, comedy) to an MP3 file. Then I can burn those files to a CD (or iPod). I found two free ways to do this. One is by using FLV Online Converter . In this case I didn't even have to download the video. Enter the address of the video, choose the format to convert to, and click 'start'. After the conversion, you will see a file is being downloaded in the new format (MP3). The other way is a program that will convert the FLV files I have on my PC. I got Audio/Video To Exe . Put the file where you want it to run, open the file, and save the exe that is extracted from this file. The extracted file is the program that does the conversion. So... Cool!!

TV Tome

TV Tome has really grown into something nice. This site has guides (episode, cast,etc.) to many of the shows that have been on TV, a section on the new TV shows of the past season - cancelled and returning, a section on the new shows of the new season, and much more. Of course I don't agree with much of the commentary on last year's new shows, so why should I listen to what they say about the new shows. But that goes with most critics.
I'm still calling it TV Tome, even though they have changed it to just TV.com.

Ultimate TV

This used to be UltimateTv, now it is Zap2it.
For more information on what is happening in the TV world, this is the site for you. When the new TV schedules come out during the summer, you can find them here. You can find Nielson rankings also, at least for the top 20. For Nielson rankings, first click on TV , then TV News and finally Ratings. This page will give you a choice of various rankings.

The Encyclopedia of Television

As the site name implies, this is an encyclopedia. For someone who has been watching TV since it started, I really can enjoy reading and reminiscing about all the old TV shows. There's an essay about each show it has, with loads of information.

Tim's TV Showcase

Tim has quite a site on TV. Plenty of information on what he says is 788 TV shows. Plus a section for some Emmy winners and commercials, and a list of links to many other sites about TV. How did he collect all this stuff?

Box-Office Results

Here's a place where you can find which are the top 50 grossing films of the week. For each of these films, find their total gross, number of theaters they are currently in, and the number of weeks they have beem released. You can also check the results from last week, the top 50 grossing films of each year since 1985, and the top 100 grossing films of all time. That's pretty neat.

Oscars

What I like about the Oscars is their Academy Awards Database. Look up all the winners or all the nominees in any category. Then you can check out what other awards or nominations that person has ever had. Or see what other awards or nominations the movie had. Or just look up a person or movie right from the search.

Movie Reviews

Meta Critic

This site not only provides you with reviews of different movies, but provides a rating from 1 to 10 from different critics, so that you can easily compare the reviews. You could learn more easily which critics you agree with and which ones don't. Good service on film reviews.

Rotten Tomatoes

Similar in concept to Meta Critic, but there is not a common rating system by the reviewers, although they give you the final score. So, it's a distant second review site.