Recently, I’ve been driven to seek content online that I could have consumed via my Time Warner Cable tether. Televised content on the web is a different proposition than video that originated on the web. “TV on the web” implies a crossover of content from broadcast or cable delivery to IP delivery; effectively acting as video on demand, a source of show excerpts, or a fountain of “extras” such as behind the scenes footage, interviews, promos, etc. In Part 1 of “Missed Opportunities” I’ll take a look at one trek to the web for televised content that I think is rife with missed opportunities. Subsequent parts in the series will look at other online outlets for televised content and note their hits and misses.

CONFESSION
I know someone on a reality show, and I will go so far as to admit that I partake in a couple of reality show indulgences. My nano sized brush with reality greatness involves “America’s Next Producer” on the TV Guide Channel. Time Warner Cable seems to think that I get the TV Guide Channel, proudly displaying both the channel ID and the show in the onscreen guide, but all I can ever get is video black or local coverage of a neighborhood swim meet (there’s something mesmerizing about the long slow back and forth panning during the 10 year old medley relay –SOMEONE HELP ME!! YOUTUBE HAS EATEN THE DISCRIMINATING PORTION OF MY BRAIN –I’LL WATCH ANYTHING!). Back to reality.

GOING ONLINE

So I turn to TV Guide.com’s America’s Next Producer Episode Guide for some help. Here’s what I get: The video player doesn’t have a full screen mode. Image size is small compared to the increased size of most online video presentations. A button on the player control bar says “Launch Video & Photo Player” but has nothing to do with this player; opening a new player window with a different set of content from TV Guide. Confusing. Clicking on the “EP. 4″ tab brings up ANP Episode 4 with a text summary of the episode to the right. Additional content is available in a scrolling list immediately below the player. From there I can select a sneak preview of Episode 5 or any one of the previous episodes. If I click on one of the upper tabs for “EP 2″ to watch Episode 2 the text summary updates to the right, telling me what happened on the show. If I choose Episode 2 from the list below, the show summary does not update; leaving the last episode choice’s text in place. Poor UI design overall. The player is cranky. I’ve hit the site weekly to catch episodes 1-4. The player consistently performs poorly with Safari and Firefox; often failing to restart video playback after a pause. The further into a show, the more likely an unsuccessful pause, requiring a page reload AND a restart from the beginning of the show. There’s no shuttle feature although the interface implies it, so pausing to grab a beer at the 20 minute mark risks a full restart AND gets you a 20 minutes wait to get back to the point where you attempted a pause. NOT BEER FRIENDLY.

On the main ANP page, you can watch extras. After every clip the player becomes unresponsive; requiring me re-initialize the player by reloading the page. Perhaps this is a “Mac thing.” I tested with multiple versions of Safari and Firefox on multiple Apple computers. The show features Apple products prominently in nearly every shot. The least they could do is make the site work with the focus of a sponsor’s product placement.

ADVERTISING
Every episode stream begins with the same :30 TV spot –Jennifer Love Hewitt struggling with her bra straps and wishing she had a Hanes All Over Comfort Bra. TVG surely isn’t using pre-roll customization based on cookies, web bugs and behavioral tracking or even simple rotation. As much as I enjoy the shimmying, shilling Hewitt, this is a missed opportunity to hit my demo a little more accurately. I’m surprised that TVG is willing to air the one hour show with no commercials at all (coming in at just under 39 minutes). I’d have been OK with one spot per break which would still make me feel like I saved time over watching the show on cable.

If I can be so foolish as to suggest that the show itself has too little advertising, I’ll counter that by saying the extras on the ANP home page have too much. Each extra leads with a :30 spot and an TV Guide Broadband sounder and closes with a ANP sounder. The Episode Recaps, with just over a minute of content approach a 1:1 ratio of content to ads+IDs. The exit interviews and video blogs excerpts, though a little longer, less ad laden. Agencies have been comfortable with producing :15 spots for TV for quite some time. Give us :15’s for these web snippets –please.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Luckily for TVG, my acquaintance is moving on to Episode 5 and online viewing is my only option if I want to keep up the show. Don’t touch that pause button! And, get me a beer while you’re up.

FOLLOWUP

I failed to get this posted as soon as I’d hoped, so another episode has aired and the online viewing experience hasn’t improved. Video player performance and the episode guide interface remain a mess. Episode 5 doesn’t even show up among the upper selection tabs, but can be found in the secondary content list below; therefore the 100 word summary from Episode 4 is on display as Episode 5 plays. The stream failed three times; once with a sudden jump to a promo piece. Unable to shuttle forward into the show, I had invested more than the length of the show in terms of time and only seen half of it. I gave up and watched the 2 minute episode recap to find out who won the challenge and who was eliminated. If I didn’t have a connection with a contestant who’s still alive on this show, frustration would have trumped interest by now.

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