Wishful Thinking

Ok, so, in my experience, there has been near unanimous panning of ABC’s video player.  It seems to only work well for people directly connected to ABC’s servers with fiber optic cable.  So today when I twitted to a friend about how she shouldn’t get sucked into it’s cruddiness I got a response from someone else on Twitter directing me to the new and ‘improved’ ABC video player.

I decided to take a gander at Better Off Ted, a show that I’ve only seen clips of and have been amused.  What a great time to get into a new show with a new and better video player!  And then I was let down, again.  ABC has made some changes for the better.  For one it doesn’t open a million different windows to get to your video, instead staying put in the same window you linked to.  The video by default plays quite large instead of the small view that had to be enlarged in the old player.  In general it has the look of better players on the web like Hulu, and that’s about where the good ends.

As soon as the first commercial started playing I knew I was back in familiar territory.  The video and audio was choppy and never got better.  This was a problem that I’ve examined from several different computers to ensure it wasn’t just mine, and I’ve yet to find a computer that the player works well on.  Oddly enough, when the video starts playing the choppiness calms down a bit, but not much.  In addition to the lag, the first advertisement threw me off when the video stopped by my show hadn’t started.  Turns out the Continue button was hidden above the ad as it was the same color as the background.  Something I’m sure that’s easy enough to change but overlooked.

It seems obvious that ABC really doesn’t want you to watch their shows online, it just wants to give the guise that they want you to.  Hulu does a phenomenal job of bringing videos to our computer screens, as do a few other services.  Why is it then that ABC can’t?  I realize my computer connection isn’t the best, and even watching Hulu I do have to turn off most other processes, but when I do that I get a very clear and watchable picture.  Nothing I can do makes ABC shows watchable online.

To stave off the argument that Fox and NBC have too much money between them for Hulu look at CBS.  The CBS video player works just fine and isn’t a cooperative project like Hulu.  Bottom line is ABC is putting the screws to us.  If they don’t want us to watch their shows online then don’t put them up at all.  DVDs cost to much and until I have a DVR that can hold multiple seasons of shows I’m just going to have to avoid further ABC shows that my schedule prohibits me from keeping up with.  Sorry ABC, if you want to make any money off of me make your video player faster so you can get some ad money from me watching.