Thoughts on ABC.com's full episode streaming

Chances are you've already noticed that ABC.com is streaming full length episodes of some of their more popular shows. This normally wouldn't be news with everyone jumping into video these days, but there are two things that set it apart. One, it's free. Two, it's amazingly open to anyone (in the US) who wants to watch.

Normally with sites like these you to create an account, select a video player, choose your bandwidth (like most people know what that is), and jump through all kinds of roadblocks in order to get to the video content. And then once you get there, if it's DRM'ed Windows Media and you're using OS X, fuhgetaboutit.

Now, as a Flash developer and OS X user, I'm somewhat biased in my preference for Flash video, but it's with good reason. There simply isn't another cross-platform, browser-based, video delivery platform that provides this level of user experience or quality in one complete package. And the 16:9 videos look outstanding (I'm sure this will be the first time some non-HDTV owners will see their favorite ABC shows in this format).

And then there's the ads. I expected to see ads injected into the videos themselves, until I noticed the duration time code on the hour long shows were 45 minutes or so. The commercial breaks are still there, but the Flash interface switches to a full frame advertisement with a countdown timer to return to the show. Normally I loathe ads, but these are actually decent. They offer compelling promotional content in the form of movie trailers, photo galleries, and other interactive elements that go beyond a typical 30 second spot. It would have been nice if the player automatically returned to the show when the ad completed, but I guess that could have caused all kinds of problems with movie trailers 1 minute or greater in length. So ABC did the right thing and offered a "Go Now" button when 30 seconds are up, which is about as long as you can hope for a user to hang around.

All that said, there are a few things about ABC's offering I'm not all that wild for. One, the load time. I'm on a blazing fast connection, and I'm forced to wait at the introductory spinning ABC logo for way longer than I should have to (the reason, no doubt, is due to the heavy load of JPGs in their interface, most of which are rather superfluous). Two, the video player interface itself. They tried to cram way to much information and functionality into a thin row, and the user experience suffers as a result. There's plenty of room outside of the controller for a lot of this information; most of which don't even pertain to the clip you're watching.

In all, ABC is referring to it as an "experiment" with an end date of June 30, but without a doubt -- next time I miss Lost and forget to set up the DVR, I'm heading over to ABC and leaving the torrent client in the dock (which is certainly music to ABC's ears).