ABC: Great WebTV Gets Screwed Up
Creating a product that is worthy of being spoken about to friends is the best kind of marketing there is. Giving people more options to spread is even better.
ABC has done both, creating the highly addictive Lost, and being forethinking enough to allow people to watch online at their convenience, so that they don’t have to watch at exactly 10pm on Wednesdays. Because no matter how addicting their show is, people still have lives, and they have BitTorrent and YouTube.
So ABC did the smart thing and monetized it by putting streaming TV episodes with commercials online. No extra installs needing, no plugins (other than flash). Then it messed up.
I go to watch yesterdays episode earlier this evening and suddenly ABC.com demands you give some demographic data - name, year of birth, and sex. All right, all right, fair enough. Then they demand I install a plugin. GRRR, but I really need my Lost fix, so I go ahead and accept, and Firefox freezes. I’m addicted so I restart my browser and try again. Freeze.
I figure it may be a plugin complication, as I have a decent amount installed, so then I try it on my other computer, which has a virtually unmodified Firefox. Freeze again. I assume they were just idiots and didn’t test for Firefox (which is a terrible mistake), and so after dinner I launch the evil Internet Explorer. Now I have to register with my email and password and full DOB, in addition to the previous information, but it doesn’t freeze.
And what do I get for this new plugin that they claim is for my own good? The same exact player I had before. Except now it only plays on my computer screen, and not the 32″ TV set it’s attached to. Yes, I know that’s not that huge, but I’m in a dorm room, so it looks massive. My girlfriend still complains that it’s too big.
There are several lessons to this:
- Don’t offer your customers something and then take it away, make it worse, or mess it up entirely
- Do testing before you launch your products on multiple platforms, and if you’re a big company, don’t modify on the fly
- Don’t make video any more difficult than it needs to be. Almost everyone has flash, so just use a flash player
ABC, hear me out. I like what you’ve been doing, and you’re gaining brand loyalty with me. Don’t mess it up by breaking things that are already working!
