In the advertising-space race to get full episodes online, Global TV (one of the bigger media companies in Canada) just launched their new video player with a series of promotional bumpers on TV. From the URLs of the RSS feeds (e.g. http://canwest.a.mms.mavenapps.net:80/feeds/) it looks like they purchased Media Services from Maven Networks.
- Positive aspects of the player
- the 4 last episodes of “Heroes” and “Survivor” online
- everything is Flash Video so it actually runs on my Mac
- RSS feeds of almost everything
- one pre-roll ad before every clip (8 min segment) is reasonable
- Negative aspects of the player
- shows like “House” and “Prison Break” just have recaps online
- buggy (see screenshot below – it froze that way)
- no full screen (just 2X)
- Flash animation effects just make it hard to navigate
I’ve seen way worse players, so I guess that makes it okay. It can deliver video at a reasonable quality, so all they really need is some more content. They have some high-profile U.S. shows I wouldn’t mind catching up on if I’m too lazy to download the torrents. But I still don’t think a TV station has nailed the episodes-on-the-web experience. Hopefully we’ll have some better offerings from the other big broadcasters in the next few months 
Thanks for laying down the gauntlet, Global. I’ll see you soon 
And Keebler Blog launches a new look, nice!
Oh man.. now you’ve done it. We better deliver something now.
Woot!
Looks like they got rid of the “Library” player, and replaced it with a page of links to their show pages and their individual players. That’s probably for the best
[...] probably because I’ve been really busy at work. Yes, even Keebler/Blog has a day job I hinted a little what I might have been up to, but we’re finally in public-Beta and I can just tell you: a new [...]