What’s wrong with online videos?

Inspired by the launch of Bud.tv, I took a quick tour of what’s available in online video. And the results are a frustrating mix, to say the least. It’s certainly more complicated than the video programming I can get from my DirecTV dish. How a normal person is expected to make this technology work is beyond me. After looking at a couple of video sites, I came up with eight different problems:

First of all, my expectation is to be as close to the YouTube user experience as possible: you browse the video content on the home page, click what you want, and the video starts playing within the existing browser frame. I don’t want to download any special media player, thank you very much. I already have a bunch of them running on my hard drive. I also don’t want to go looking for the video; it should be easy to find what you want to watch.

Second, it should work with my setup. I don’t want any secondary windows to appear, because you might have pop-ups blocked and I don’t feel like allowing your video site to be whitelisted on my site. I don’t want to make any other changes to my browser settings to allow your video to start, because that might break something else or open myself up to other vulnerabilities.

Third, I want this to work on just about any browser and OS I use, but certainly more so than the Windows/IE combination (and while we’re reviewing, let’s make sure IE 7 doesn’t break when I use it). to browse your site as well). Many of us use multiple browsers on multiple platforms, and we don’t want to have to boot up a particular PC just to see something. This, of course, goes against almost everything Microsoft and Apple are doing.

Fourth, I want an easy and simple way to “email this video to a friend”. Part of the fun of watching videos online is sharing them with 100 of your closest friends. Having said that, I want some element of confidence that you, as the site owner, aren’t going to take all those emails and sell them to some spammer in Moldova.

Fifth, I don’t want to go to extreme lengths to deal with your registration system just to get your video. Life is too short, I already have too many passwords to deal with, and I can go elsewhere for video content anyway, so why mess around trying to get through any door you put in my way?

Sixth, I don’t care if the content is copyrighted or not. I know, this is heresy for someone who makes content for a living, but I think a short three-minute clip is fair use. Get over it, major media moguls, and be glad someone cares enough to record and post a clip promoting your show. Now, there are certainly different issues involved when you download a full two hour movie, but here I am talking about consuming short pieces of content.

Seventh, if you’re going to stream, do it with the right amount of caching so the audio doesn’t cut up and the picture doesn’t jitter. And if you’re going to ask me to download something, the download shouldn’t take longer than watching the actual clip. But I would prefer streaming, just because I don’t want to clutter my hard drive with videos I won’t watch more than once.

Finally, I want to see more than just a postage stamp-sized window. I don’t have to be full screen, DVD quality, but it sure would be nice to at least see something that comes close to filling my screen. Right now, that’s more of a bandwidth issue, and most sites, including YouTube, don’t display a big enough image.

Taking all of these topics together, it’s a tall order for most web videos today. YouTube pretty much ticks all the boxes, more or less, which is why the site has amassed so many followers and garnered so many GoogleBucks. Let’s take a look at a few others and see where they are lacking.

Netflix announced that it will soon start streaming videos to its customers, and I have yet to see it firsthand. But as a very satisfied customer, I wish them the best. They have the best video search in the business and have the right idea for the rest of the user experience. I hope they live up to expectations.

Bud.tv, our hometown industry start-up here in St. Louis, uses a special pop-up player they got from Akamai/Nine Systems. (A demerit for that.) It has a pretty good registration system that actually checks my date of birth against a national database (I no longer use January 1 as my default entry, which is something I recommend to confuse identity theft). They do this to make sure you’re over 21, but I didn’t see any content that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing with my teenage daughter on the site. There are already people complaining about the problems, and I anticipate that they will scrap this system before too long.

Bud.tv also fails in search: you scroll through a horizontal channel bar which is now quite short, but once the site goes live it won’t be very functional. I don’t imagine many users will tolerate this method for long, and either won’t return or just return to one or two channels that resonate with them (the TriggerStreet.com short films were big hits for me). They stream all of their videos and the sound cuts out several times on my DSL connection. Since the site just launched this week, I can’t say if I’ll be a repeat visitor.

An example of a video site I won’t return to is CinemaNow. They require IE, download their own player, and are generally painful for me.

One video series that I really enjoy is Amanda Congdon, on ABCnews.com. I’ve been watching it on iTunes, because it was too hard to find the content using a web bookmark. So right off the bat I’m breaking some of my rules, but I consider my iTunes a pre-existing software condition. The weekly videos are about five minutes long, and Congdon is cute, funny, and informative all rolled into one. Downloads happen in the background (one of the benefits of having iTunes as your player) and the quality is top notch, what you’d expect from a TV station.

So, as you can see, we have a long way to go before online video can be as easy as pressing a couple of buttons on a remote control and watching regular TV. Well, maybe we’re about to cross over: Getting my DirecTV remote to turn all the entertainment devices in my living room on and off isn’t easy, and I still don’t have everything working the way my wife wants it to. Maybe those browser video plugins aren’t so bad after all.