Streamza review

May 5, 2019 – 1 Comment

Streamza is a multimedia server build around torrents, where the torrent network works as a source for all levels of entertainment. The main selling point is its video streaming capabilities. But is their shared library user-friendly? What about newcomers, do they care about them? And how is the overall feeling after weeks of testing? Should you go into Streamza seas or should you stay on the island waiting for another boat?

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Before you can read the answer to our questions, it is important to know who we are. Torrent Alternative is a team of developers, graphics, computer science graduates and torrent fans and we gathered in one office to test all torrent downloaders on the web that we found. Torrenting is the downloading technology of tomorrow and if our work brings more people into this shared experience, we think that it will make a demand for the tomorrow tech. With this introduction in mind, please, allow us to share our view of Streamza.

Entertainment centre

Streamza has a more unique approach which makes it harder to draw comparisons with other services. Their strength lies in being an entertainment centre similar to Kodi or Infuse but they have a library of torrents that you reach in order to watch a movie. This means that user storage actually doesn’t exist. All files are stored in a central “database” and your account only remembers a pointer to these files. This could be an obstacle for someone but most of the users have got used to it. Streamza widens their repertoire of torrents with their userbase adding new ones with their downloads. This comes hand in hand with the instant download which is copying content from the database. It is faster than most of the torrent downloads but that is simply because it is not a download. We would name it rather a copy or clone function.

Features and functions

Speaking of storage, the means of access are limited for simple usage. You can add, remove or download content and that’s about it. Sorting or different way of organizing is not possible during the time of this review. The video player is an average one that is reliable to use. We miss some kind of connectivity to third-party software/hardware but on baseline usage it was alright. That guides us to the next point which is accessibility. Unfortunately, phone usage doesn’t feel good, the design is not responsive and it clearly shows that this service is built for computers only.

Unfortunately, even on computers, you can run into a number of issues. FAQ link, Support link, Terms link, they don’t work which can frustrate newcomers. On the personal note, we don’t like that you can not read the Terms you are agreeing to obey, however, since most of the people don’t read them anyway it is maybe a step into a new era.

Watch for the long nose

There is another elephant in the room when it comes to newcomers which is Streamza’s Free plan. With this plan, you can not download your files to local storage and you can only watch a 30 seconds clips of movies you add to your account. This doesn’t give you any clue how the service will work and if we based our review only on this experience, we would be harsh. The premium experience is better in all ways but there is no point of having the free plan if you can not do anything with it.

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It would be better to give users a taste of premium with some sort of limitation (we understand that free users slow down the growth of the service). We like the social-network-like feeling based on the friend list and ability to share with each other. Our review team has mixed feelings about the point system but after we gathered reviews from Twitter, forums or other places on the internet, we must say that the majority is happy with the point-based system. This means you buy points for real money and you use these points to run features of your Streamza account.

Conclusion

This gets us to the end of our review. Do we recommend Streamza? It is harder to tell. On one hand, it is a good torrent based multimedia platform with a lot of interesting ideas, on the other hand, there are multiple things we don’t fully support and we don’t like to stand behind them. That is why we give a mixed recommendation. If you are a newcomer and you want a more regular service without hard to explain the point-based system, we would doubt your choice of Streamza. There is a lot of services that have their pros and cons (and you can find more about them on our site) and Streamza is no different to this which is why we rate them 2 stars out of five.