MSNBC.com launches cool new video player
Don Day December 14th, 2007
MSNBC.com unleashed its new video player to the masses today, and it offers a raft of features. The video quality is top-notch, and it uses Flash. The player screen itself is nice and roomy, measuring about 600 pixels wide. While a clip is playing, related links display along the bottom of the player, and the video clip pauses if you decide to take a look.
When you select a clip, a playlist comes along with it, putting several related clips in the queue. Also, three pre-programmed playlists are available in the upper left-hand side of the player window — including Top Videos, Most Viewed, and Weird News. Other navigation mirros MSNBC.com’s text-side navigation, with US News, Politics, Business etc. Embeddable video clips and search will be available “soon.”
When a pre-roll plays, a medium rectangle replaces the left navigation. It appears the new player is following the same approach as MSN Video, which is one pre-roll for every three minutes of use.
In full-screen mode, you can mouse-over the left screen to surface the nav.
Here’s the Alpha Channel blog entry on the player with the title, “Don’t kill your television (we’re still in beta).”
8 Comments Add your own
1. Mark | December 14th, 2007 at 10:52 am
I like it a lot - player looks great, video quality is fantastic.
Two things bug me, though. Firstly, the new player doesn’t have the netcasts of Today or the Nightly News (at least not yet, anyway) - so you still have to watch those on the poorer-quality msn player.
Also, the player likes to pop up a new window on IE7 whenever you click on a link - why can’t I just have a new tab?
2. Cory | December 14th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Very slick, fast-loading, intuitive layout. The related links (which typically link the text news story on the same topic) is a great feature. Me likey.
Only thing I would add, and maybe this is coming soon, but clips are difficult to share. Click the “email” button and it launches your email application (nasty). And since it’s a pop-up player, you can’t grab a clip’s URL — which is a very popular way people share video.
3. Chandra | December 14th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I’ll get excited when MSNBC.com et al add closed captioning to Web-based videos and players to make them fully accessible. What is it with the dunces behind Internet video that causes them to think it’s acceptable to ignore such a large segment of society, namely people who require subtitles for a variety of legitimate reasons?
Captions are a standard, not to mention law, for much of broadcast television, and they should be for online video, as well. After all this time, I can’t believe the continuing blatant disregard demonstrated by networks and companies on this essential issue. They hype their video quality, new look, yada, yada, yada ad nauseum and still refuse to add something so simple. Duh.
4. Rex | December 14th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Cory, your second point isn’t true! There’s a URL bar there — you CAN copy a clip’s URL.
(This is the last thing I worked on before leaving. I’m so glad it turned out so well.)
5. Cory | December 14th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I stand corrected! Didn’t realize it changed dynamically with each clip.
Good stuff!
6. tdc | December 14th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
clean.
7. Tonto Weinstein | December 17th, 2007 at 10:06 am
This is very nicely done.
@Chandra:
There’s two problems with closed-captioning on the web. The first is that much of the content isn’t captioned because it ends up being the content that sits on a server somewhere prior to air. The obvious solution is for the web people to scrape the video off broadcast rather than take it off the news server. But until they’re required to recaption it, don’t hold your breath.
The other issue is much more difficult. Many times, the transcoders for the video simply throw out the captioning when it’s there. And display on the client side hasn’t been all that trivial either. However, with Adobe CS3, captioning became a lot easier. Provided it gets put in during transcoding, you’ll see captions on web content.
Captioning on the web isn’t a “duh” issue; it’s complex. But I agree, it’s time that people start making it available.
8. Steve | February 7th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Cory/Rex talked about sharing…is it possible to grab a clip and record to your harddrive (i.e. newsclips for presentation or later viewing)?
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed