Instant-On Online Video To Make Your Surfing Experience More Annoying
from the might-go-a-little-too-far dept
The former CTO from Real Audio (who was apparently something of a child prodigy) is working on a new company that would let people view videos online instantly without having to wait for the video to download. At least, that's the idea. It works by downloading popular content in the background, so when you go to a web page that offers the video, it can start playing locally immediately. This seems to have quite a few limitations (and apparently sites like ESPN are already using competing technology). For example, it's only going to work with popular sites that offer video and have signed up for this service. Since the guy thinks it's big use will be for video advertising, I'd wonder what the appeal is for end users. Who wants to install something that will make it easier for advertisers to push annoying, intrusive video ads on you? Already, I get annoyed at the flash video ads that seem to be everywhere, and which seem to do a pretty good job right now of starting up right away. This seems like technology that could be useful in some circumstances, but which is being pushed for the wrong reasons.
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Flash is being abused
I spent over an hour the other day researching how to "unplug" flash from my explorer (it is no longer a plugin, but more a core part of the product).
I have no use for flash, as it is used 99.9% of the times to push advertisements. In the other tiny case, it is a stupid menu system that somebody has built (such as the one at scifi.com) but a non-flash version is usually available.
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