The state of Internet Streaming Video

Wow, it's been nearly 2 months without an update! While the focus of this blog is mostly technical, all I can say is that I've moved, and as such, I've been busy with such things. But I digress.

So the other day, I was surfing the internet looking at www.liberatedgames.com (highly recommended), and I saw a banner ad for one of the major PC new sites (PCWorld or C|Net or something like that) listing the top 10 most unique games of all time. Naturally, I was intrigued; having been bit by the gaming bug at quite a young age and my desire for geeky top 10 lists, I ended up following the ad. What ensued was in a word, frustrating, for I had no control over it and there is no real fix for it.

So anyway, rather than being presented with some form of textual top 10 list like I see many places, this site had clips of these rather unique games, with buttons at the bottom of the page that showed the 'places' of these games. Interesting idea, and the idea of having 30 second clips of content displaying gameplay was highly effective in showing just how cool these games were (in one, for example, you're a mosquito and you try to suck blood from a 'host family'. Innovative, to say the least!). I certainly found myself entertained, and enjoying the first two or three clips.

I never made it past 3.

Patience is a virtue, they say, though if I truly was one for patience, I'd still be on dial-up and not broadband cable internet. Anyway, after I clicked on the first video clip to play it, I was greeted by the now-traditional introductory 30 second video before the clip started streaming. No biggie. With that out of the way, I sat back and watched the first 30 second clip, finding myself mildly amused. Certainly, because these were small reviews of different games, I wasn't too excited when I saw 'streaming clip 2 of 10', so once again, I waited my 30 seconds for that 30 second clip. ...however, rather than being greeted by the next game, I'm once again forced to sit and wait 30 seconds for YET ANOTHER 30 second ad. "No big deal" I tell myself, and watch the same ad from a minute thirty ago play again, shrug it off, and wait again for the second clip to play. Again, a 'slightly more' interesting, unique game is displayed. Once it's finished, however, I realize that, surprise surprise, we're streaming ANOTHER 30 second ad! By this time, I'm frustrated. I just want to watch the content. Deciding I would be 'sneaky', I went down to the numbered buttons for the clips and click #3, skipping some of the games in between. Alas though, it was not to be so sneaky, as that same ad, the one I had been forced to watch 2 times prior pops up. Frustrated, I just close the window.

What am I complaining about here? It's the state of internet streaming video and how now half the f***ing content I watch is ads! I think about this, and wonder... if CNN.com were half ads, would people go to their site to read the news? What if you went to a website to read an article and after reading a paragraph, an ad the size of that paragraph was between the one paragraph and the next? Or how about if the way the site was designed was such that you couldn't scroll past the ad until you were forced to sit there for 30 seconds and physically LOOK AT IT? I have a feeling that if text on the internet worked like that, you'd almost never read an article again.

I understand that to be on the internet, you have to make money. To make money, you can either request donations, or you can put these little ads up, which I have no problem. The problem becomes when 50% of what I'm viewing is an ad that I cannot skip unless I want to skip the content of what I'm watching entirely!

The reason I post this today rather than a few days ago is because some AOL videos just tried to pull the same stunt with me. 30 seconds of ads for either a 30 second or 1 minute clip, each and every clip. As well, AIM has those stupid movie ads that play at the top of the IM window, which usually have sound going, so if you have your buddy list open and are playing a game for example, you suddenly hear this background garbage which is yet another ad playing! Like holy crap people! I don't mind ads I can just 'filter out', like say banners on pages that only appear on the sides or top of the page, but these obtrusive ads just have to go! How about those annoying popups that appear in the same window as what you're trying to look at? They have the close button, but are physically sitting over the text, and are not a regular 'Windows' window. Ugh, nothing short of annoying.

The solution? Well, I think I'll go live as a hermit and crawl under a rock. Maybe then, I'll escape it all.

...linux article coming soon.