Watching TV on a computer is a bit like playing World of Warcraft on a phone - you probably can, but it's a bit rubbish. There are some rather nice players out there right now, like the BBC iPlayer, but the main reservation I have is that I'm as likely to watch programmes, that have already been aired, via my computer in my office as I am to watch them via my hard disk recorder in the living room. Which is not very likely. Once a programme has gone, it's pretty much gone, and I never seem to to find the time to go back and 'watch again'. Unless it's a Robyn Hitchcock documentary on BBC 4. I can always find time for one of those.
I've often listened to my friend John Murray commentating on a mid-week champions league match on Radio 5 via Real Player from the BBC site, as I'm supposed to be on a conference call about widgets or something, and that works pretty well. They sometimes even sync up graphic scoreboards to give you something to look at while you're listening, but really, its still not like watching football on TV. I could probably find last Saturday's Match of the Day and watch it again on Wednesday, but it's not like watching it at the time and it's not live football anyway.
So all hail ITV. Even though they have a reasonable offering in the way of recently aired items to pick and choose from and watch again, what really makes itv.com worth going to is the fact that I can watch ITV channels there. Live. Well, a few seconds delay, but it's a live stream of the 4 ITV channels, not a stored, cut, archived and expired (usually) version of the ITV output. This is hugely significant, as it means that should, for instance, a UEFA Cup final happen to clash with a conference call about prototypes, then I am now able to have the full moving pictures of the game, as it happens, next to an InDesign document of web design components, while pretending to know what I'm talking about on the phone. I wouldn't actually do that, of course, I'd be 100% committed to the conference call, but let's just say that's a plausible scenario. I did try an experiment with the itv.com pictures streaming and John commentating via bbc.co.uk, to see how they might sync up. It took a few minutes to work out who was lagging, and to my surprise, the Radio 5 audio stream is about 2 and a half minutes behind the ITV1 video stream, but even that was better than listening to Clive Tyldesley (that doesn't translate well, but I expect Dave will understand).
Of course, the whole thing is pretty much 'undefined' as an experience if you're using Firefox, as the player requires Silverlight, but frankly, there are times when I'll just use Internet Explorer and be done with it.
Technorati Tags:
streaming video
internet tv
bbc
itv
Listening Post: The Roots: The Return to Innocence Lost
but we really do a whole lot more than just ask you to point out broken links and typos.
Maybe you'd actually prefer to see our servers presented in terms of their attributes, so that you can begin your research by asking "What servers have you got that can run Linux?", or maybe "I've got $5000 and I want a Sun server now. Show me what you've got". In any case, you'd be hard pressed right now to complete a customer journey like that without going through a number of hoops. Backwards, probably.
Its probably unfair to pick out Forbes, as there's any number of article-based sites out there which adopt this style of page format. I say, 'adopt this style', but what that really means is 'crams as many ads into the available space', even if they are those circular ads which are published by, and point to, yourself. I guess I still hanker after solid design frameworks and excellence in user experience, but as the channels on the internet converge with the channels on TV and other media, it's predictable that the demands for return on investment drive the content model. Perhaps I should be tipping my hat to the page designers who manage to actually squeeze some content into these pages, notwithstanding the requirements for ad placement, cross-marketing, subscription targets and everything else. That is a real user experience challenge, albeit not one I'd like to have to take on.
being crashed unceremoniously against the woodwork with accompanying cries of "c'mon! C'MON-AH!", is ad server code that halts a page load mid-stream until its finished its business. I'm sure the page owners have bought into the most efficient geo-located edge-based web service out there, so why is it increasingly the case that while pages get faster, ad servers seem to get slower? Perhaps it's a deliberate interaction feature, I mean, nothing grabs your attention more than a broken page, but from a customer experience point of view, I don't think that's a journey I would normally care to continue with.
But how do you know what's new and where do you expect to find that out? When you're looking at something the scale of sun.com and trying to determine customer behaviours for a given page type, it's not alway a simple task to predict. You might be the kind of visitor who would casually visit the sun.com home page and, not unreasonably, expect to see anything newsworthy enough, that you might be compelled to actually invest time in, to be present right there. You might be more specific than that. You might be the CTO for an SMB or some other suitable market research defined acronym pairing, in which case, you'd probably know that we've got a place
But that can't save me from being a lazy arse. I like to put images in blog posts to illustrate points, or just to make myself less uninteresting than I am. I also like to have them aligned left or, usually, right, with text wrapping around them. This is from the HTML 1.0 handbook, right? So I was rightly ashamed of myself when I installed the
We've got a new place for Small and Medium Businesses on sun.com.
Adobe Bridge? Anyway, since installing CS3 a while back, things have not run smoothly. Most recently, I've had nasty problems with failure to boot or shutdown, and my suspicions have been aroused by the network activity icons blinking away in the corner as everything else fails to start.
Not my words. Those good folks at
Its a challenging task, and we're trying to accommodate multiple feedback types across multiple venues, and, naturally, tight project deadlines (which means I should probably be building wireframes instead of writing this). Where we're focusing our efforts right now is on just how far we can go with contextually-driven feedback. If we're able to categorize the invitation in terms of the customer task and the current context, we should, in theory, be able to cut a swathe through a task filtering navigation path and drive straight to the submission phase, where any options or forms are specific to the task. However, we can't be completely confident that our invitations will always be contextually clean. We'll often use a global navigation component to host a persistent link, and it wouldn't be enough to simply assume that because a customer clicked on a link labeled 'feedback' in a footer on a product page that they are necessarily wanting to provide feedback on that product. They might just want to tell us the site is very slow today. It may also be true that even though they may have accepted an invitation to feed back on a particular product, what they really want to say is that we've actually speelled the product incorructly, which we might call a 'typo', which as everyone knows, goes straight to the jitterbug queue labeled 'null'. Only joking.
So hallelujah for
next is a neat way of putting off what I'm supposed to do next, but at least I know in what order I'm not getting around to things.
We just recently resolved an implementation issue that had been going back and forth between
from a) the blogs.sun.com comment system and b) the sun.com postmaster replying to bounces from the comment system sending to people who don't work here anymore, that were all rather, well, polite in their spamness.
status). It was the annual Design Summit at Sun and there was a healthy focus on our online presence and a key note from