Archive for May, 2010

Satellite Direct. What is it really?

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Well, in short Satellite Direct isn’t nearly as good as promised. I’m not sure if they have any fine print that disclaims the “3500 HD Channels” statement, but everyone should know that you won’t get that many HD channels. Heck, I can’t imagine that there are that many High Definition channels around yet even on a world wide basis. Claiming that you’ll get 3500 HD Channels is simply fraud.

So Satellite Direct leaves some things to wish for. Also many of the probably better quality channels arent available in the “one time fee” version that they’re selling. Instead you can upgrade your account for a “$4.95 trial month” subscription (not sure what it would cost from there on) to get access to them all.

Also some channels aren’t even live but “recorded programs” that start the same every time you start the channel.

So far it looks pretty fishy, borderline a scam. So should everyone forget about putting $49.95 into a thing like that?

I’d say so. The fact that you can make your favourite foreign or local channels readily accessible may be of some worth though, if it wasn’t for the fact that you can do the exact same thing on free sites like wwitv. Heck, Satellite Direct really is nothing more than a software shell for a free streaming site. Plus the navigation system in SD doesn’t give you much overview, at least until you’ve constructed that list of “favourites” that are more easily accessible. From the start there is no system to sort out channels by category and such. The only way to sort is by country, and when selecting for example “sweden” you get a list of about half a dozen channels (of which all of them aren’t even swedish). Compare this to the 300ish swedish channels that are promised on the Satellite Direct home page.

All in all there aren’t 3500+ channels. Maybe about half of that. I don’t intend to count them, cause there is still a bunch. Satellite Direct Channels List.

Further many channels aren’t available a large portion of the day, and channels like Animal Planet HD, or FOX HD, ESPN HD and bigger networks like that, that at least some affiliates of Satellite Direct claim that they provide, are nowhere to be found.

To put it short. What Satellite Direct is, again, is a pretty poorly constructed interface to watch tv channels online that also are accessible for free at the networks own web sites, or free streaming sites. Even if the service can be of marginal use for some, they are basically selling what can just as easily be aquired for free, plus the fact that it is half a world away from what it promises (especially as to picture quality) and certainly isn’t something that is to replace your cable provider, makes it at the bottom line a scam. And since even a good internet connection often will struggle with stuttering images and buffering timeouts, I doubt anyone will feel the service is worth a $49.95 tag.

I rate it 1 / 5.
http://www.satellitedirect.com/
Update May 25th: It seems satellitedirect.tv is now offline. Satellitedirect.com claims to be the official site (that site though used to load content from satellitedirect.tv, but now instead uses “digitalsatellite.tv” as content source). Also clickbank hoplinks have started pointing directly to digitalsatellite.tv (they previously pointed to satellitedirect.tv, not satellitedirect.com). Sorry lots of domain talk here but the bottom line is that Satellite Direct are switching domains for whatever reason. Maybe their old domain or email is getting black-listed here and there, or they just want to get away from their old name out of bad publicity or otherwise. Either way it sure doesn’t look good. — end update.

The average picture quality of Satellite Direct:

(click the thumbnails for bigger versions)

Most are terrible. Some are ok, but I actually have yet to find one channel that lives up to true HD.

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Any site that claim to offer quality Internet TV for a one time fee I feel can safely be labelled scams. It’s simply an impossible business model to provide hundreds of quality channels legally without charging a pretty hefty subscription fee. There are working options for Internet TV, but then you have to pay accordingly. A2btv, for example, but the price tag is $99/month. There are also sites offering the same deal as Satellite Direct, but for free. An example of that is iFreeTV (affiliate link), and if you like to see what Satellite Direct is offering or if you simply prefer an application rather than free streaming sites, you can try that one out. They are all free streams though of course.

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Other services profiting the same way as Satellite Direct and offering either the same or similar content as them include domains tvnoop.com, hdtvkanaler.com, streamdirect.tv, tv-in-pc.com, satelliteultimate.com, satellitesoft.com, itv-pro.com, worldtvpc.com, direct-pctv.com, livetv4me.com, football-tv-live-online.com, satellitetvtopc.com, dtv4pc.net, to name a few.

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Adspy Pro

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

If you, like me, have been in the “affiliate marketing business” for quite some time, you may have seen products such as The Google Cash Detective and services of that sort. AdSpy Pro is a lighter version of many of those. And at $27 it is much cheaper than most.

What does it do? Well it looks up ads displayed on Google for certain keywords that you choose and takes note whenever an affiliate product is promoted for any of those search keywords. It does so for a chosen period of time (like a couple of weeks) and whenever an ad is spotted a large percentage of the time chances are that ad is being profitable which leaves the field open to basically copy that “winning ad” and make some money for yourself promoting the same product.

I’m not going to write in length about this. If you know how to promote affiliate stuff you do, if you don’t the net is full of guides and do’s and dont’s about it. Adspy Pro is certainly no get rich quick scheme, but in contrast to many other clickbank products it isn’t really promoted as such so that can’t be held against it. I’m going to put it short in a few bullet points for and against.

  • It really does much of what it promises. And as such it can be a valuable tool to see which markets and offers are currently hot.
  • The price is way below much of the competition. Also and importantly, Adspy Pro is not a subscription service like most of its competitors.

  • Adspy Pro is a server php script that needs to be installed in a pretty manual fashion on a server that you have access to. The server also needs to be able to do “cron jobs” that is the script needs to be able to automatically execute every 6 hours or so, so it’s a good idea to look that up before settling for a server.
  • The script misses a lot of affiliate links being promoted. Not only does it only track certain networks, but it only detects some sites that are promoting the offers via a “splash” landing page.
  • When other services claim to track millions of keywords readily researched in a database, with Adspy Pro you are limited to a few hundred at max (or you risk being slapped by google) that you track yourself. I guess this is one of the effects of the low price tag. Another downside of not having access to already tracked keywords is of course that even if you can spot the affiliate ads the same day you start scanning, you have to give it a few weeks to have any confidence that an ad has stayed long enough to be profitable.
  • The admin page can be painfully slow. This of course partly comes down to the speed of the server where the script is being hosted, but the script itself seems pretty slow. Though not as bad that it can’t be used.

The conclusion is that if you’re not running any similar type of program, AdSpy Pro really can do some good in that it can give pointers as to which offers and keywords are likely to convert. Sure you can use a free app like PPC Web Spy, but with that one you can’t scan for many keywords at a time, and see which ones stays online over time. Adspy does indeed have some drawbacks as stated above but all in all it is a decent alternative for the task. As many of you may know these days the use of an app like this is somewhat limited by the fact that Google doesn’t like several advertisers marketing the same offers for a keyword, so simply copying and pasting a successful ad campaign isn’t that straight forward anymore. There are ways around it though like custom landing pages and such and bottom line as a research tool I think Adspy Pro does do a decent job.

My rating: 3/5

http://www.adspypro.com/

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Sportsbettingchamp

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Rating: 0 / 5

This one pretty much reviews itself. A “win 97% of your bets” system of course is too good to be true. Not that clickbank never lets shady products slip through for promotion, but I’m amazed that even they won’t stop things like this. It’s amusing though that lines like ” Locking eyes and wave at all the fine ladies along the way before arriving to the sportsbook!” have a place in the sales pitch. Oh well.

The Sportsbettingchamp system claims to make the author over $70,000 a week. That is pretty amazing since the system is nothing more than a good old martingale. If you’ve been anything into betting chances are you’ve either heared some excited friend tell you about this or you’ve come up with it yourself in a stroke of genious. Anyway how it works is say you bet $10 on a 50% outcome and if you lose you will double your bet for every loss which guarantees that as soon as you win you will be up $10.

I probably don’t need to say that while this in theory does work, it assumes infinite deep pockets and so even if you have all the money in the world eventually you will lose it all as the bets grow exponentially larger.

I’m amazed though that if the author of Sportsbettingchamp claims to win $10k a day with his system, he better not start his bets with $10.. Of course he doesn’t follow the system but it is such an obviously false statement for anyone purchasing the product and realising what it is about.

The claim to “win 97% of the time”, it turns out is to be interpreted as “winning 97% of the group of bets that will end with a win”. In other words a LOSS-LOSS-WIN in this universe will count as a win. Interestingly he admits to lose 3% of the time, and by his group-win reasoning to lose means he couldnt afford betting higher, which of course means that any loss means he then lost it all.

I guess I can go on more about this product but you probably see what it’s about. Just don’t buy it. It’s beyond crap.

Another Martingale variation scamming people through clickbank is “Underdog Wealth System”. Stay far away from that one as well.

http://www.sportsbettingchamp.com

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