You may be aware that Viacom/Comedy Central removed their user-uploaded clips of Jon Stewart from youtube. Instead they host the show themselves. Here’s what this means:
- more comedy central commercials (well, that’s not a surprise)
- harder unmanageable URLs
- the only way you can watch is by starting up a crappy pop up window
- wrong video problems. I have spent the last 15 minutes trying to start a single video (the interview with Bill Crystal) and still have not gotten it to work. First, it played the wrong video, then it played another wrong video, then it played two more commercials.
- Latency problems. It’s taking a lot longer to load a comedy central clip than the typical Youtube clip. (Hey, akamai is hosting their videos; what’s the problem?)
I understand why Comedy Central wants to keep users on its own site rather than youtube. But their akamai-backed site is so awful that it could end up hurting numbers for the shows themselves. But if you can’t make a decent video hosting site, why not pay someone to do it for you?
Leave a Reply