Why does the New York Times video suck?

Does anyone have any clue as to why the New York Times video streaming is simply the worst on the internet?

The Problems:

• It doesn’t pre-buffer the entire video if there is additional bandwidth
• You can’t make it full-screen
• Skipping around in the clip is hit or miss.
• The pre-roll advertisements don’t work great either and seem erratic.
• And worst of all, the bandwidth that the NYT puts towards this is simply insufficient. I have a fairly fast connection and it skips nonstop. This never happens on YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, or Blip.tv. This is a them problem, not a me problem.
• Ok I lied, something that pisses me off even more than the above is that the pre-roll advertisements always have enough bandwidth to play. They don’t skip. I don’t know if there’s some weird optimization going on, or if they simply allocate more bandwidth, but while the videos skip, the ads never do.

Thankfully the NYT does post many of it’s videos to Youtube, but they aren’t always up there quickly and not all of them. It’s sad when YouTube is the higher quality/more stable alternative since YouTube’s compression is generally really bad looking.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 7:57 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.