Bumpy start for Evening News simulcast
Cory Bergman September 5th, 2006
The first-ever live simulcast of a network evening news broadcast was plagued with problems when Katie Couric debuted tonight. At first, the player took forever to load. For a few, it finally loaded and played. For others it never loaded at all. In my case, I tried to play the “on demand” version of the newscast at 7:30 p.m. (I entered a New York zip code to get around the time zone blocker — it airs at 8:30 p.m. ET on the West Coast), but it played the pre-roll ad five times in a row before the newscast began. Staci over at PaidContent tried to play it on a variety of platforms and browsers, but no luck. When it finally did play, the quality was top notch. And hey, I imagine CBSNews.com is getting hammered with traffic. In fact, I’ll venture to guess they’ve set a record.
8 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | September 5th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
…and who is suprised by this?
2. Gene | September 5th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Ugh. Here it is, 2006, and this video still requires Windows Media Player… and it won’t play it on a Mac, despite the fact that WMP runs on a Mac.I mean, how long was this revamped site and video section in development, and why did they not bother to make it Mac compatible?
I can’t figure out why large content providers continue to make their products available to only one segment of the audience.
3. Steve | September 5th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Because Mac users represent less than 5% of the PC market? I feel for you, but they’re simply serving the majority.
4. Anonymous | September 6th, 2006 at 7:06 am
Flash Video
5. Safran | September 6th, 2006 at 7:13 am
You can’t stream live Flash video
6. discreet_chaos | September 6th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Everybody complains about the content providers going with the better quality video player, but nobody points toward Apple. It seems to me that there could be something done from the Apple end just as easily, but they’re apparently willing to leave their adherents out in the cold as some kind of protest or something.
7. gregtyree.com » Blo&hellip | September 6th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
[...] This could have been a great opportunity to showcase what you can do with video online and instead we are reading about the problems rather than how cool it is that the main networks are now simulcasting the evening news. Lost Remote TV Blog - Bumpy start for Evening News simulcast [...]
8. MOJO | January 18th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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