I downloaded Crackle on the iPad and let’s say I am rather disappointed. I might not be so disappointed if it wasn’t over marketed. First the number of movies are limited. Out of that limited number most are either clips or highlights. Those movies that are full length are at least 30 to 40 years old. The same is true for what TV series are available. A lot are partial episodes or highlights and all the shows that I saw were at least 10 years old. The big come on is that you can watch free Seinfeld episodes, which is true however what they don’t tell you is there are only 10 episodes, which is less then a full season. Those 10 episodes are probably some of the newer TV episodes available.
There are filters including genre like action/adventure, comedy and you can also filter to show full episodes or full length movies. You can also filter for clips or movie trailers, unfortunately this filter is pretty much useless since even full length movies or TV episodes also offer clips or trailers. The other problem I have with the filtering system is it is not sticky, so you have to remember to do the filtering each time.
Since the application is free I understand the need for commercials, but it’s the same one over and over again. Also why after every commercial is the end of the previous scene repeated, I know that we all have short memory spans but 30 seconds really. The ad situation should improve over time. In the Privacy notification, they do say they are collecting your date of birth, name, email address, and gender and anything else you provide. They use this information to customize advertising, send out service notifications and to conduct research. Crackle also state that any information that you provide in the service profile “including, without limitation, your user name, age, gender, favorite links, where you live, and other personal details you choose to share. maybe shared with all users of the service. The one that bothers me the most on this list is where you live, because it is unclear if they means what country or state you are in or some thing more. I did go back and look at the sign up and the only ones you have to fill out are user name, date of birth and gender, everything else is optional. Unfortunately I suspect a lot of people will fill in everything automatically.
Crackle does have some good points, first it is free and it does have some classic series like Barney Miller NewsRadio and Benson There are quite a few anime series available also. There are also some good movies including Easy Rider and Fail Safe. Is it worth downloading, well it is free, so yes, but don’t expect too much. Hopefully, they can get more content over time, but that will be up to the content owners so I am not holding my breath.