Dovetail TV Launches Free Quality Time-Killers

Dovetail.tv, a new entertainment portal that launched yesterday, wants to elevate the quality of online video. "We’re not just another user-generated site for webcam karaoke or videos of a kid peeing on a log," Dovetail CEO Jason Holloway told the business website Red Herring.

Indeed, with videos from independent filmmakers, and specific channels devoted to work from the L.A. Filmmakers' Co-Op and the San Francisco International Festival of Short Films, Dovetail's product is by and large a cut above the junk on Grouper and YouTube. Dovetail also touts its hi-resolution quality, achieved via a DRM-secure peer-to-peer network (similar to BitTorrent) – though films are not available to burn onto DVD.

A recent tour through Dovetail's site unveiled a promising collection of trailers – though screen size was a little too small to get a strong sense of the content – and fast and easy installation for the Dovetail player. When we downloaded an original "Dovetail Presents" short called "Haptics," a dystopian CGI animated tale produced by Future Thought Productions that received high marks from viewers ("Pixar should be nervous"), the 5-minute film took about 20 minutes to download, and the streaming speed didn't keep up with the moving image.

But at no cost to viewers, a hi-definition full-screen image, and a short movie that was actually worth watching, who's complaining? Check it out now, before Dovetail starts slapping ads onto its site to raise revenue in order to survive.