MSNBC Alpha Channel Videos in Beta: Large Size Video Player & the unwelcome 30 s Ads
The new Video player of msnbc.com (still in beta) has been introduced by Stokes Young on the Alpha Channel blog of MSNBC :
We are the web site of NBC News, and the primary goal of our new video player is to help you experience the stories you want to see when you want to see them. We want you to have a terrific experience watching Nightly News in the morning or TODAY tonight or Meet the Press on Tuesday. … The video should be big and crisp but reliably load at the speed with which NBC News crews deploy to cover stories around the world. …on the widest possible array of operating systems and modern browsers, including Safari, Firefox, Flock, Camino, Opera and Omniweb. You will need Flash 9 if you don’t already have it installed, and JavaScript must be enabled.
And Stokes, what about advertising in the videos?
despite all of the thoughtful feedback you’ve given us over the years, we still have advertising in our video player. A few notes on that: First, my cat needs to eat. Second, and far more importantly, it’s not free for NBC News to gather important news in difficult places. Third, look for some real viewer-centric innovation on this front soon.
I see. Viewer-centric innovation, hmmm. It must be related to relevancy and user-control, I hope. As for feeding the cats, one of the commenters wrote While another pointed out that it would be better to restore the option of closing advertising fly outs. I especially like commenter Thor Willson’s ad reward scheme: “Please reward me for my patience by making the ads progressively shorter during my view session. If the first ad is 30 seconds, fine. I may only watch 10 seconds of any given clip–I will end my viewing session in less than 90 seconds if I’m facing 30-second ads between each video. Please give me a reason to watch more videos.”
Anyway, Alpha Channel NBC News blog is like a cub of an alpha male? Alpha male syndrome has been several times associated with Microsoft leaders like Steve Ballmer, no matter how much and how deeply it can backfire (just like an ironic controversy of an alpha service being in beta - unlike the Google-approach, which seems to play at beta being in alpha)
How come that the Alpha Male’s Video is still in Beta, Stokes?
1. We are aware of a few glitches with the player … So we ask you first for a liberal dose of feedback and second for a pinch of patience as we keep cranking to get this as perfect as we can.
2. We’re still chasing in some very important details. Namely: Search (you can, of course, search for our video in the fine interface at MSN Video, our parent and steadfast partner), Embed (coming soon, we promise) and Live (for a little while, at least, our Live video will play outside of this experience).
Embedding MSNBC Videos? We must have a look at that!
Henry Cohen (former video mag editor) finds it somewhat funny “that in a high def world, we’re still excited by a better version of standard definition. Especially when it comes from a leading broadcaster.” I couldn’t agree more.