I came across Hitbliss on Gizmodo yesterday and thought I’d give it a shot. The service allows users to watch ads and earn money that can be used to purchase Movies and TV Shows. Although the offerings are currently limited, they have a decent selection of movies and shows. The service is delivered through an application interface that the user has to download and install. Currently, the service is only available to Windows and Mac
users, though the website does say that they’ll be adding support for mobile platforms soon.
As soon as you launch the Hitbliss app, you’re asked to sign in with your facebook account. Then you’re given three different options to choose how fast you’d like to earn money watching ads. Basically, the idea is the more you personalize your account (give them your age, location, gender etc.) the faster you earn money and the fewer ads you see. I decided to pick the fastest earning option and gave Hitbliss some info about me. The company assures users that they use the best data protection system ‘in the business’, though there’s absolutely no information available about it.
Once you have everything set up, you’re taken to the home page of the app, where you get to browse through all the Movies and TV Shows that the service offers. The offerings are few but some noteworthy shows were ‘Big Bang Theory’, ‘Walking Dead’ and ‘The Office’. Under ‘New Releases’ for movies ‘Argo’, ‘End of Days’, ‘Ted’ and ‘The Dark Knight
Rises’ were some of the many movies available.
So at this point I decided that the service had a decent enough list of movies and shows for me to try it out. I began watching ads. There was nothing special about the ads, they seemed like the ones you see on TV everyday. The ads weren’t delivered in full screen and the Hitbliss app made sure I was in front of the computer by making me click on a smiley face that popped up on the bottom of the screen. This would happen a couple times during
the 10 minutes or so that I watched ads. The smiley would appear in a different position in the lower portion of the screen each time, making it slightly annoying to have to move your mouse to where it is. But, the app also allows you to hit ‘Enter’ instead, taking care of that problem. An earnings bar appears on the bottom right corner and you see how much you’ve earned so far. When you begin using the service, you start off on the
lowest ‘Trust Level’. The more ads you watch and the more smiley faces you click, the more trust you earn. And as you earn more trust, you start to get fewer smiley faces to click (meaning they trust that you’re actually watching the ads and not doing something else instead). The earning system is set up somewhat like a game, giving you more points for a faster response to the smiley faces.
So after watching ads for a while, I decided to use my hard earned cash to watch the latest episode of ‘Big Bang Theory’. I had earned $2.74 and the episode cost $1.99. Hitbliss does allow users to pay for content using their credit cards if they choose to do so. While this is a great alternative for users, I’d rather use real money on iTunes than a new service like Hitbliss. So, I used my earned cash to get the episode. The video began playback
immediately and didn’t have any lag at all two minutes in. I then decided to take my viewing experience to my TV. When I plugged in my Macbook Pro to my TV, Hitbliss detected the change in aspect ratio and asked me if I’d like to restart the app to adjust to the new ratio. I restarted the app and resumed watching the episode with no issues throughout it’s full length. The video was of high quality but wasn’t HD.
If you don’t mind ads, Hitbliss is a great way to watch (sort of) free movies and shows online. The ads are personalized, so they’re relevant to you, although I saw a lot of PSAs about drunk driving even though I don’t own a car (maybe people my age have been on a drink-and-drive binge lately).
Check out Hitbliss here.
The Young Technocrat 