I don't know which comes first at NBC, huge amounts of money to set up their web sites, or the egg they lay when their viewers can't load their site quickly enough, get hammered with obnoxiously long commercials, interminable loading times, and way too much flash and pinnache going on when the viewer just wants to watch a particular promo.
If I want to see the Betty White promo for her 2010 Mothers day Saturday Night Live appearance, I first have to go to the third page of Google to find the link to NBC! That's right. I typed a google search for Official Betty White Sat Night Live, and the Saturday Night live link did not show up UNTIL THE THIRD PAGE OF GOOGLE!
25 OTHER WEB SITES were listed above NBC, and this no doubt has to do with the dodgyness of trying to access their site.
Thankfully, embedding the promo from NBC is a much easier way to view the promo. If you clicked the link above, you will appreciate how much easier it is to view the same promo below.
Although the beginning of the promo jumps every single time I play it on my computer, the reason may be it was either encoded incorrectly, or it could be the additional promo that is probably playing off of the same web page even though you can't see it here is actually still causing a problem.
NBC's philosophy seems to be a battle of competing interests. It appears to me that NBC is attempting to earn revenue for every viewer who lands on their web pages by bombarding them with too many commercials, distractions and even an obnoxious survey when one leaves the site, when all the viewer wants to do is watch a specific promo.
Every space on the web page has to be ALLOCATED a SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF DATA CAPACITY. Web pages should not load in a high resolution promo ad off to the side in a tiny box and expect the actual program content of the page to load in an effective, efficient, AND FAST manner.
NBC actually put up a "buffer warning" when one goes to a page of theirs as a way to excuse their shoddy promo playback capacity. At the time I wrote this, even with the buffer warning, the beginning of the 2010 Saturday Night Live Betty White Promo has severe image skipping issues. After a couple of seconds the image does settle down.
It just frustrates me to see such a huge company like NBC take months upon months to figure out what they are doing wrong. I already contacted the local KNBC in Los Angeles back in January about a local web playback issue. KNBC forwarded my call to their tech department, and the person who did agree with my analysis of why their page was taking so long to load and not playing back everything on the page correctly explained that they only do fixes at the beginning of each month.
Wow!
One shouldn't judge the effectiveness of a web page by using the latest, fastest computer. One needs to actually use a computer that is at least two years old to get a more realistic idea of what the computer audience is seeing when they load onto a site, and then not take up until a month to FIX THE PROBLEM.
At NBC, they should consider hiring additional IT help to scale down the amount of data ALL of the components on their web pages require. Which brings us to NBC's support of "Green issues".
If NBC is saving a few bucks and not hiring enough IT people to properly scale down their web pages then NBC is actually wasting huge amounts of bandwidth unnecessarily. NBC's web pages, in my opinion, are not green optimized if they don't take the time to efficiently scale down how much bandwidth is needed to run their web pages properly.
Every High Resolution photo, movie clip, photo montage, or promo that is not properly scaled down and jpeg'd WASTES BANDWIDTH, AND THEREFORE, WASTES ENERGY. Can somebody explain this to NBC, please?
Here is another Betty White Promo, very funny. Academy Awards, anybody?
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