Sunday, May 10, 2009

Banes of My Existence: NBC.com

So we don't have tv anymore; well, we have a tv, but it's not hooked up to anything outside of the DVD player that allows us to watch anything. This is not a big deal. It was an easy choice to make, in fact, because there's really nothing on tv anymore that you can't watch online or via DVD. So we've got to wait until Thursday night to watch Lost-- so what? It's a perfect plan... except for NBC.com.

NBC.com sucks. It's one of the worst sites of any kind that I've ever suffered through. Navigation is more difficult than it should be; to watch an episode it often takes several clicks just to get to the player. But that's nothing compared to how !@#$ long it takes to watch an episode. Let's say you're watching The Office; the show will play for roughly five seconds, then buffer for five seconds, then play then buffer. So you pause the show, to allow it to buffer. First off, the shows often don't stay paused, starting up again without warning. Secondly, no matter how long you pause, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Last week I started an episode while my wife took a shower, and paused it. After she was done, we resumed the episode, and it didn't make it to the credits. Ridiculous!

NBC, look at the sites for Fox and ABC ( I suppose you could look at CBS, but I haven't watched a CBS show in years. Do they have a web site?). Shows play continuously without interruption. There's no reason to have such poor streaming video. And you're only hurting yourself; we haven't sampled Parks and Recreation, for example, because it's too much of a pain in the ass. Thank God none of your hour long shows are worth watching.

Stop sucking, NBC.com!

1 comment:

  1. you know, NBC shows are all on Hulu now right? Works much better than the NBC.com page...

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