Do executives ever try their services? (My experience trying to watch LOST online)

February 24, 2009 by
Filed under: Strategy 

lost-logoThis past weekend when my wife and I sat down to catch up on ABC’s Lost we realized that our DVR had not been recording the show.  It turns out that this had been going on for several weeks, but being parents of a 3 and a 4 year old, we had not noticed.  In order to catch up I started to look at my options to watch the missed episodes legally.  

Don’t Demand so much….

My cable company has an OnDemand feature which allows you to immediately watch a catalog of TV shows and movies.  I had recently seen a new category called Primetime On Demand so I thought I would give that a shot.  I was presented with content from the following stations:

  • CBS
  • FX
  • NBC
  • USA

Not only is this a pathetic channel listing, the content for each of those stations is laughable.  Does anyone at Time Warner actually use this?  It still amazes me that companies put up services which no one in their right mind would use.  In my house OnDemand is a service my children benefit from, that’s it.  They don’t mind watching the same show over and over again.  I love to introduce my kids to my childhood cartoons and this service helps in that respect, but once we have seen the 4 episodes of The Jetsons which are available, I have to wait at least another month for the catalog to be refreshed.  

I am so LOST…

So being the geek that I am I next turn to Boxee on my Mac.  Boxee is a great tool which is trying to do for TV what Napster did for music.  No, it is not about pirating TV shows, it is about bringing together a unified user experience so we don’t have to hunt for content at NBC.com, ABC.com, etc.  Boxee merely presents the content already available on these websites in one place, ads and all.  Unfortunately Boxee has to work around limitations and changes on the network’s websites for our benefit.  Currently Boxee is working through some of these technical issues with abc.com, so once again i fail in my quest to watch this TV show.  If the networks would just work with Boxee instead of against them, these problems would not exist.  But have network executives ever tried Boxee?

Off to ABC.com (abc.go.com  why are they still on this go.com thing?)

The worst user experience to hit internet TV has to be abc.go.com  I had been to their site before and that is why I left it to the end.  I must say since I had last visited they have at least improved the site so that you can get to the show page in a few clicks.  The problem is the actual experience of watching the show.  When you actually try to watch an ABC show, you go through the following:

  • You select the show you want to watch, this launches another window with the area for the episode in the middle and the episodes on the right hand side.  The problem with this is that you can only see the thumbnails of four episodes at a time, and they put up “enhanced” episodes, so you actually just see 2 episode choices.
  • Once you make the episode selection an ad plays, no problem except for the fact that once the ad completes, you have to “click to continue.”  This happens at every commercial break, and in my case I guess no ads were available so I got to just sit back and watch a counter countdown to 0 before I could click to continue.
  • Once the show starts, you can make the player full screen however, when the commercial comes on, you are taken out of full screen mode back to the player window to see the add, and when you click to continue you are once again taken back to full screen mode. This has got to be the most disorienting and annoying part of the experience.

I have to think that this is a conspiracy by ABC to make people hate watching TV on the internet so much that they will not bother with it.  Has anyone from ABC actually sat down and tried to use this horrible service?  In my mind, if you are not even going to try to do something reasonably well, why try at all?  

A great user experience…

If you haven’t tried hulu.com, you should.  It is the closest we have come to a legal way to watch TV on the internet and the experience doesn’t suck.  When you find the show you want to watch, all the episodes are clearly listed on the same page.  When you start a show no pop ups are thrown at you.  Ads are shown on the same player as the episode and you don’t need to leave full screen mode to see them.  Best of all, when the ads end, the show just picks up where it left off, no clicking to continue, just like on TV.   Wow, how amazing, it’s like rocket science I guess. Hulu even gets this right; if you just want to see what shows they have in their catalog, no problem, there is an alphabetical listing, (can you hear me Joost?)

Why does hulu work and OnDemand or abc.com don’t?

It is obvious to me that the people who developed hulu.com love TV.  They actually see a future for instant tv over the internet and they have actually used their service.  That’s it, it’s not magic.  I am sure they “eat their own dog food”  Have the ABC executives ever tried Hulu?  I can’t believe they have given what they have on the ABC site.  I think the CBS guys learned because their current site tv.com sucks a lot less than their previous attempts.

Even NBC which has a lot of content on Hulu still has news.msnbc.com which is probably the worst place to watch their nightly news.  I guess the news division hasn’t been on Hulu, or they would just put their content there.

Trying to hold on to the past

Unfortunately, Hulu only has rights to some of the content from NBC and FOX and a few other stations.  Want CBS content, go to tv.com.  Want ABC, well, you go through that horrible nightmare of a site.  Or do you?  Well actually you don’t.  You just have to go to bittorrent TV aggregation sites.  There you can get all the stations in one place.  Every show, even before they air on the West Coast.  No commercials, no clicking to continue.  Want 720p, no problem.  While Hulu’s content is only available in the US, via bitorrent if you are outside the US, no problem.    On bittorrent you can even find shows not available legally anywhere else.  You can even get content from other countries and with some tools like RSS, new episodes will arrive automatically ready for you to watch just like your DVR, only better.

Have TV executives ever tried these bittorrent sites?  Aparently not, because if they had, they would see how poor their services are compared to what’s already available.  They are not benefitting by trying to lock content to the US.  In this global market it would seem to me more productive to develop a business model that works globally and take advantage of emerging markets.  Would Pepsi restrict sales of their drinks to the US only?  No, that would be ridiculous.  Why does this have to be different? 

Lets bury our heads in the sand

When Napster happened, Music labels could have embraced the new distribution channel, but they were intent on protecting the $16.99 per CD they were accustomed to getting.  Some artists were used to putting 2 or 3 good tracks per CD and still selling the entire album.  Today iTunes has changed the game.  Now people get to decide what is good and can pick and choose the 3 tracks they like.  They also get to pay a much more reasonable price per track.  Some would argue that even at $0.99 the price per song is too high, but at least Apple helped the music industry by giving them a fighting chance.  Suing Napster out of existence and trying to lock up their content with DRM didn’t really solve anything. Embracing the changing landscape sooner could have put them in a much better position.

Globalization does not just affect hard goods…

Today we are all more connected than anyone in the history of man.  This availability of information means that people in the US can learn of a great show in the UK like the IT Crowd, but unfortunately there is no legitimate outlet to consume the content.  Will prohibition work this time?  I am sure it won’t.   Technology has sped past this road block and while content providers sit back trying to protect their content, I am sure someone is developing even better ways to get around these restrictions.  

Carpe Diem..

If the industry is going to prevent their content from being freely distributed without commercials, they must get ahead of the curve.  Give users a reason to access the content legitimately by partnering with Hulu, Boxee and others.  At the very least if you MUST have total control try to make the experience on your site suck less.  Please, this is not so hard.

The only way to learn is to do…

There is no substitute for first hand experience.  If you are an executive making strategic decisions about your product or service, the first thing you need to do is use it.  No Power Point can ever convey the experience your users go through when setting up and using what you sell.  Once you experience your product, try your competition’s product.  You don’t have to lift every idea from them, but a TV executive can never know how amazing bittorrent and usenet are until they have tried them.  

When you don’t know your product or your competition first hand, it is very simple to pull the wool over your eyes and if you surround yourself with people who won’t bluntly state the realities of the market, you are bound to fail, it’s just a matter of time.

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Comments

One Comment on Do executives ever try their services? (My experience trying to watch LOST online)

  1. Capitalizing on accessibility, the Authors Guild is out of touch | Caldeas Blog on Wed, 25th Feb 2009 7:26 pm

    2. [...] like TV executives will not be able to stop the progress of internet TV, the publishing industry will not be able to stop text-to-speech. It’s already on every Mac. [...]

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