ITV, you’re doing online video wrong…

[almostwitty]

With the Pet Shop Boys being given a Outstanding Contribution to Music award at The Brits, I thought I’d look at ITV’s Brits website just to see what behind the scenes content they had. To be fair, they had a reasonable range of content, but it was all let down by the following:

• It took four clicks from The Brits homepage to get to the page I wanted - even though it was prominently advertised on the front page.
• See that cunning play icon overlaid on the main picture of the Pet Shop Boys on this page? Click it, and wait forever for the pic to change to a video … before realising that the video is being played in ANOTHER window on the right hand side of the page.
• Then keep waiting as an entire minute of adverts is played out before your eyes before you even get to the main feature. At least other commercial TV websites like Hulu only play one advert lasting 30 seconds.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if you were watching a thirty minute programme … but all this for a clip lasting three minutes?

The trouble with ITV’s approach to online video is that it seems to show a breath-taking arrogance for ignoring the way online video has been built up till now on other platforms, with a determination to do it their way. From YouTube to Hulu to iPlayer, people now expect when you’re clicking on a play icon, that the video will play where the play icon was, not on another window on the other side of the screen. Trying to establish a different user interface for the sake of it just seems incredibly daft, if not arrogant. We’re living in a world where 37% of 15-24 year-olds say they mostly hear music via YouTube. The corporate world is littered with the corpses of once mighty companies who didn’t notice when little minnows slowly took away their audience.

Oh, and why is Kylie hosting with James Corden? It’s almost as inanely dull and self-consciously zany as the Samantha Fox/Mick Fleetwood pairing…

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[shove-this-job.livejournal.com]

It may be my luddite talking, but didn't someone just release a program where you could tranfer videos from Youtube onto mp3, thus avoiding costs of purchasing music?

[almostwitty]

Cunning people have been doing that for ages. But I'm guessing the young people of today just set up their computers with a playlist and play it all out.

[severe-delays.livejournal.com]

I just bookmark my youtube faves. Saves hassle.

As for ITV-player it is ABYSMAL. There are a (very) few things I've wanted to watch on there but as the programme either freezes, stutters, jumps back or forward by entire sections or occasionally just gets depressed and quits playing I no longer use it. What really makes me puzzle is the fact that adverts are shown on it. Why on earth are companies willing to pay to advertise on something so inherently bad? Most of the ads are never seen.

[thrashgrrrl.livejournal.com]

Yay I'm glad Iron Maiden and Kings of Leon won Brit Awards although how come Kings of Leon were in the International section? They're from Wales ffs!

I think the ITV player is rubbish, can't even watch Dexter on it(ITV4 only as it's not shown here in Scotland on ITV1)

[almostwitty]

To be fair, the people who have the online rights to Dexter probably want to keep them for their own video website... so you just download it from torrents like everybody else ;)