If you were to sit down and try really hard to make the worst user interface on the planet, I bet you couldn’t do a better (worse) job than Time Warner has done with it’s On Demand system. This holds true across all cable companies, but Time Warner is reputed to be the worst one, according to all my friends who broker with these clowns.
When I bother to turn on my cable and search for something to watch On Demand, it is a painful experience. Nine times out of ten, the system won’t start, leading me to NY1 no matter what I do. Want to watch a preview? Oops, that will get you stuck again. Want to get out of one of their ingenious channels, like “In Theaters,” good luck.
The system is so bad that the aggregators who put films in the system literally tell you that your film title should be low in the alphabet (or start with a number) so that you end up earlier in the A-Z list because most consumers don’t make it past the C’s. Really.
This would all be cute, except I’m willing to bet that it’s costing the film industry millions. Billions maybe. Lots of recent reports, like this one from The Wrap, point out how much money indies and Hollywood are making from VOD. It is the future, and I’m not arguing against it. But the fact that consumers will put up with this much crap to watch their movie at home, on demand, tells me that there’s a staggering amount of value being left on the table. If these interfaces worked at all, I’m willing to bet that VOD revenues would skyrocket – not double, but increase by a magnitude of 300% or greater. It’s likely the top reason that people turn to pirate sites – they’re that much easier to use.
Why do cable companies use such shitty technology today? Why do film companies allow this travesty to continue?
My only guess is that cable companies can’t compete with Silicon Valley. All the good engineers go to tech start-ups and cable companies (and their device makers) are left with the bozos who can’t compete. Either that or cable company executives are the bozos left behind… but that can’t be right, could it?
Nope. My real guess is that it’s just another case of the industry collectively sitting on it’s ass accepting the status-quo. This makes for a nice space for disruption, but it makes for a crappy consumer experience, which come to think about it is the new mantra for all things in film consumerism – crappy consumer experience.