Shoot the geeks
I have been trying all day to watch 18 Doughty Street, the new British online political network. I have installed no end of needless crap on my Mac and on Firefox. I have tried to watch it in Firefox, Safari, and IE. And nothing works. I tried to leave them a comment but they made me go through some complex registration process. I tried to send them email but the link was broken. Arrrrggghhh. They have made this needlessly, stupidly complicated. I just one a few seconds to play. But it made a horrible buzzing noise, then lost its sound, then froze. Never put technology in the hands of pols. Damned disaster.
Tags: Exploding_TV
October 10th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
The problem is them choosing Microsoft software, unlike every succesful hosting service. They should have just used an existing video hosting service.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:30 am
the layout is hideous. i am not quite sure what they thought they were trying to achieve.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:49 am
[...] Jeff rips into 18 Doughty Street too. They made it hard to view. Bad idea. [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 4:22 am
The layout is a jungle - but the streaming works perfectly here in Germany, even though I’m behind a fire wall whicht is normally more solid than the chinese wall.
October 11th, 2006 at 7:50 am
If that didn’t float your boat perhaps this might be more to your liking: http://www.theknivesareout.com/
October 11th, 2006 at 9:27 am
[...] “I have been trying all day to watch 18 Doughty Street, the new British online political network. They have made this needlessly, stupidly complicated. Never put technology in the hands of pols. Damned disaster.” – BuzzMachine [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Jeff, You set me off on a rant about Flash video too.
Geeks can be bad, but to really screw things up you need marketers after lock-in.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Oh dear. That is the most butt-ugly site I’ve ever laid eyes on! Stick with those good ‘ole southern gals of TrueGritz for a much better time.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
I’m in Safari, I followed the link in your article, clicked on live feed on the 18 Doughty St site, and had video and sound in about 5 seconds - the geezer is going on about community policing and the prison issues.
Pop up blocking is off, I’m on DSL from Orange in the UK, I do have the current flash player and the flip4mac plug in for quicktime installed. Hope you get your system sorted.
I rather like the Web site - big bold text and clear links - but then I have no design sense at all according to the missus who is a designer.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I just tried to watch live streaming of NHL games on Yahoo. It kept asking me to login and it re-booted the feed every few seconds before going black.
If you have any windows users with XP, one option is to download Windows Media Player 11 beta 2:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx
Other users can try Media Player Classic, which is a catchall for a lot of different formats:
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_players/media_player_classic.cfm
Good luck.
October 12th, 2006 at 1:00 am
Jeff, saw this and had to post this on your site. The backlash has begun. Have a look at this horrendous speech by P. Diddy about “buying” a channel on YouTube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XLcPIolG_8E
Now look at this unfamous person’s reponse to his disturbing promotion.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ES6kSKGv7dA
Her video stats:
Views: 534,196
Comments: 2025
Favorited: 670 times
Honors: 20 show
That’s street justice.
October 12th, 2006 at 1:00 am
Jeff
I can see it here in Singapore, but it is probably better when you can’t see it. the buildup was great, 100 cameras, cuting edge, webcasting.
When I look at it, it is TERRIBLE!
The content is TERRIBLE!
It looks like BBC 1962.
22 year old in suits and ties in swivel chairs having endless boingly dead politcal discussions, all seemingly shot with fixed cameras and lit and put through a switcher. For webcast!!
Talk about ‘don’t get it’.
TERRIBLE! Better you can’t download.
October 16th, 2006 at 3:16 am
Isn’t it funny how virtually everyone else reports no problem in streaming the site? Have you ever thought it could be something to do with your computer, rather than at our end. Obviously when you start something like this there are always a few teething problems and we are sorting them out, but for 98% of people it seems to work fine.
What email did you use? Send something to me at iain AT 18doughtstreet DOT com and I will get our technical people to look at it.
October 16th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Live streaming works fine here (XP Pro). Streaming of old content does not; for some reason it causes WinAmp to launch, which has no idea what to do with the file.
Personally I do not fiddle with the config of my desktop machine to view websites as a matter of policy. If everyone did that, I’d spend all day fiddling.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:06 am
18 Doughty Street
Now this is of course a terribly minor glitch in a brave adventure and from what I hear the programmes aren’t too bad. However, Jeff Jarvis is getting pretty frustrated at not being able to watch on his Mac. OK,
October 16th, 2006 at 7:15 am
As Tim W helpfully points out, I missed out a Y in my email address. It’s iain AT 18doughtystreet DOT com
October 16th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
The streams seem to require Microsoft Media Player - ideally embedded in your browser. This rules me out since for a whole variaty of technical, security, DRM-allergic and basic hate microsoft reasons I have the most minimal media player I can get away with and I refuse to let that unreliable insecure piece of junk run anything automatically in my browser anyway.
Mind you I don’t know that that is the case for sure because there is no technical FAQ that might help explain whether or not that is the case, but seeing as what I’m being asked to look at is a video/x-ms-wmx one that seems pretty certain to be the case.
I wouldn’t have thought it would be too much trouble to dig up an alternative (almost any alternative) streaming platform so that there would be a couple of ways to view content.
October 16th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I can stream on Linux with mplayer, which may also exist on OS X. However, you may be seeing the result of a server-side glitch: 18DS tends to transmit absolutely nothing, rather than a holding pattern, when they’re not transmitting content. When i tried to stream before the show began i got the same symptom, a second of bzzk! and the stream stopped.