Entertainment > Reviews (12)

Entertainment has to be one of my specialist subjects on ciao. I have always been a great fan of TV, Film and Music especially, since I write my own plays and music and watch as many films as possible. Since there is so much available in the entertainment area on ciao, and there is such a wide variety of things to read and write about, it's a category that I often find myself visiting, to catch up with what I've missed and any new releases (or old ones) from bands that I like the sound of, and, of course, those I don't.

I find Ciao extremely detailed and easy to use all over, not least in this region. There is so much to see across the region, covering Books, soundtracks and music retailers, to CDs, DVDs, gigs and TV shows. The thing that always amazes me is the number of sub-categories 'Entertainment' contains. For example, in Music, Albums there are 15 different genres of music to choose from, each of these with more than 50 sub-categories in.

Another reason why I find the entertainment area so great is that the opinions that are written in it vary so much in style. When you compare a few Nokia phonereviews together, you see they all (or mostly all) say something along the lines of: 'I love this phone. Here are the features, it's cheap, it has lots of games, go and buy it!', whilst in a typical album review there can be many different opinions on the artists in general, the mood of the music and what inspired them to write about the music, upcoming releases, and there is more to compare to other albums.

I also like the Entertainment section because it is always evolving. With all the new TV programmes and Radio shows that are being aired every 6 weeks or so and all the latest film releases coming out, both at the cinema and on DVD and video, Ciao has to keep up with them all in order to stay ahead of the game, and it does exactly that. You can always find a decent movie to go and see that you like the sound of by reading a few reviews, and there is always the chance you could come across a movie with an actor/actress that you particularly like in it, although you would never have heard of the movie otherwise.

If you have heard a lot of buzz about a new programme, eg. 'Popstars' or 'The Weakest Link', but you aren't really sure what it's about, then there are almost guaranteed to be people who have written about it, and so you can catch up with your lack of knowledge and be able to talk about the programmes when they come up in conversation.

More about the region itself, new updates and features are added freuqently, and there is always something new on the 'Entertainment' category home-page to read about. The content of the new material is always above average, even for this site, and only helps to add depth to an already very full region. Saying this, however, it is never difficult to find the product that you are looking for - even without using the search option, it is always easy to find the product using the clearly laid out categories which are distributed strategically in the category.

There are, quite often, competitions in the region which have great prizes (eg. concert tickets), something that attracts people and helps to produce better quality reviews; something that is always welcome, in my opinion.

There is, of course, one bad thing about the Entertainment category. Not that it is particular to Ciao, 'Entertainment' reviews are always more likely to be biased or contain an opinion which you would disagree with which could change your attitude to the film. For example, when reading a review about a DVD player, qualities such as 'value for money', 'number of features' and 'design' will come into play, but for an album, an album being 'pop-py' could appeal to some people but not to others, thus changing the whole rating of an opinion in the eyes of some people.

However, providing that the readers rate the opinions out of content and not out of whether they agree with the writer or not, then there shouldn't be a problem.

All in all, I can't see any faults in the category at all. My personal favourite, I think ciao work very hard to make it such a high standard, and with such a huge number of products, however bizarre or unknown the manufacturer or artist, you can usually find a review on it by someone on Ciao in the entertainment section.