Yahoo! TV
Still feeling a bit bad after all the Yahoo! bashing, I thought I would check out the redesign of Yahoo! TV. It’s a decent upgrade, and demonstrates some thought into the UI, but overall there isn’t anything going on in there that gets me hooked — probably because I don’t watch much television.
The big problem I encountered was that the videos in the upper right corner wouldn’t play. Neither Firefox nor Safari on my Mac worked. I ended up having to download some FlipForMac plug in from Microsoft. Yeah, some might chalk this up to user error, but seriously, I have no trouble playing YouTube or Google video content, and in this day and age, if a multi-billion dollar company can’t support the Mac while their competitors can, it’s Yahoo’s loss.
Other than that, my experience was fairly enlightening. I like the little UI touches, for example the horizontal scrolling thumbnails with the dots (lifted directly from Apple’s iTunes), and the thumbs up, thumbs down ratings for show episodes. At first, the thumbs seemed kind of hokey, but they’re big (just asking to be clicked on) plus I get the feeling a simple “yeah” or “nay” rating will get more user response (Ebert doesn’t do 1 to 5 stars).
I didn’t have any trouble drilling down to some of the shows I watch (Gilmore Girls and Battlestar Galactica) and checking out the episode guides, photos, and user reviews.
All that said, I got the feeling that something was ultimately missing — real content, other than links to places to buy episodes on DVD and some short user blurbs. The sad truth is, all the huge, glitzy pictures and big ads somehow cynically come across as an attempt to cover up a lack of anything I’d really like to read, look at, or watch. How about more video clips, now my browser is working?
But it’s a great foundation and although I certainly won’t become a more avid TV watcher because of it, I might turn to Yahoo! TV for research purposes. Meanwhile, I’ll be watching old clips from television shows on YouTube.
More thoughts at Mashable.
And here’s a blogger who totally hates it, since he’s mostly interested in the TV listings.
[…] Take the recent launch of Yahoo! TV, showing a desire by Yahoo! to say “me too” with flashy web 2.0 at the expense of usability. I found it surprising that company with the resources of Yahoo! couldn’t even support video on my Mac without me having to install some previously unheard of “Flip4Mac” plug-in. No other site I visit makes me use this plug-in for video, and meanwhile, everyone else moves towards Flash Video. I see this as a usability failing. […]
[…] I have to give credit where credit is due, and after some pretty annoying Yahoo! experiences in the past few months (Yahoo! TV and The 9), I checked out Yahoo! Music, and was largely pleased, and in some instances impressed. […]