For years now I’ve done the bulk of my watching television at the Comedy Network website. Home to the Daily Show and Colbert (because in Canada we’re not allowed to watch those shows on their actual websites). For years the Comedy Network website has been pretty crappy.
The video system had always been sub-YouTube in quality. I spent as much time with buffering and waiting for the clips to load as I actually did watching. Even if I were to pause the clip and walk away from the computer for a while it would only load up a minute ahead of where I was paused and just stop. If I let it load for an hour while I did other things, I’d would come back to a minute’s worth of a clip and then more waiting. And at least twice a day the clips would just give up and kick me out of the video thing and would not only stop loading the clip, it would also lose the place where it was. Combine this with the problems my computer has anyway, it made watching my stories unnecessarily large.
Well today I woke up to find a new type of clip viewer on the site. And today, no long waits and stuff. I guess I have to thank the Comedy Network. If you’re going to force me to watch the shows on your site instead of those of the actual people whose shows I want to see, I’m glad you seem to actually be making it easier for me.
While watching the next day’s shows I did have a few moments where the video had to catch up, but it may have been my computer’s fault. The only problem I’ve found is that there isn’t a bar to tell me how much of the video is loaded so that if I pause I can’t tell how far ahead the loading has gone. But whatever, if it runs smoothly it could save me a half an hour a day theoretically.