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GreysOnABCdotcom

User experience of watching Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com:

I’ll be the first to admit it…I’m a HUGE fan of the ABC TV show Grey’s Anatomy. It’s my favorite show on television ever since HBO’s Six Feet Under closed up shop last summer. As someone who’s time-shifted television viewing habits revolves around her ability to properly program her 10+ year-old VCR, you can imagine my delight when abc.com added Grey’s to their roster of shows that can be watched free on their website the night after they air on television. I was actually very excited about several of the shows offered on ABC.com as, from the previews at least, this looked like it could be a promising fall line-up.

For the first few weeks of this season I watched Grey’s Anatomy on television the night it aired (Thursdays, 9pm). In week three I either wasn’t home to set my VCR or I set it wrong but I wasn’t too upset about it as I knew I’d be able to watch it online and I was excited to try out the abc.com online experience.

This experience definitely did not live up to the expectation. Watching Grey’s Anatomy on abc.com was one of THE most frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had in a very very long time. It was a Sunday and I thought I’d take a break from studying for 45 minutes and watch the episode in my office (very fast internet connection, G5 PowerPC, 23” Apple Cinema Display, Safari). The first thing I realized when I loaded the Flash-based ABC.com Full Episode Player was that it is not scalable and therefore was floating in the center of my screen. I found it very distracting to see my desktop image underneath. Without an option to make the black background full-screen, I downloaded a plain black image using google image search and, in Preview, scaled this to fit the size of my screen. I then hid the preview toolbar and the mac dock and proceeded. Next I experienced the difference of what it was like to watch a piece of content in the “lean forward” mode that I was used to seeing in the “lean back” mode. It was a tough adjustment to make. I made the image “big” (about three times the size of “normal”) and turned off the lights in my office to try to assist in simulating the “lean back” experience, but let’s face it…an office chair and a living room couch – there’s really no comparison. After watching a tag before the episode that said, “This episode of Grey’s Anatomy is brought to you by Nasonex, the best allergy medicine ever…” (or whatever their tagline is), the episode launched. There were to be three commercial breaks. The show played okay for a little while – including the intriguingly integrated (but still quite annoying) thirty-second Nasonex ads. At all of the ad breaks, there is a small clock in the upper right-hand corner of the player next to which it says, “Will Return to Regular Programming in 30 Seconds.” At any time you can click on the ad which pauses the ad and takes you the advertisers website in a new window. If you prefer not to find out more about Nasonex, you can wait until the end of the thirty-seconds and press “Click to Continue.” Interestingly, the ad will keep playing until you press “Continue,” which I believe acts like a surrogate pause-button for viewers that want to do what they might do during a traditional commercial break (get a snack, go to the bathroom, etc.).

Grey’s played okay for a while and then it started freezing. A few times when I tried to press pause and play again it would take me back to the beginning of the segment. Though I like this show, I don’t like to watch the same scene over and over and OVER again. I started getting really frustrated. I thought maybe the player would work better in a different browser. I tried Explorer. I tried Firefox. Neither of these worked better than Safari. They were all comparably bad. It took me over an hour to watch a program that, even with the commercial breaks, was supposed to clock in at around 48 minutes. The worst part was feeling so frustrated by a show that I like so much. The frustration became heightened because the show is very good at its presentation of drama and suspense, but having these narrative qualities enhanced by technical difficulties did not make for a pleasant viewing experience.

Creative Critique

Is this entertaining or interesting? Why? / Who is this targeting (audience-wise)?

I think the concept of the free episodes offered on ABC.com is a great one. They offer shows that they know have a built-in audience and therefore can probably charge a very high price for ad sales. The specific audience for this property is a probably a younger/more tech-savvy user base that is already used to consuming large amounts of media on their computers. At the moment, however, I think the prospect of this is better than the execution and that they should be able to better back up their claims that one can, “watch full episodes online. now. free.”

Is this original?

ABC.com was the first network to offer free television online in this way (as well as the first network to offer their shows for sale on iTunes). Other networks have since followed suit (e.g CBS.com’s “innertube”). This idea was original when it was first presented, but now leaves me wondering, “is that all there is?”

What are the production values? Is it appropriate to the genre/content? / How does it use the medium? Is this just something that could be on TV but is being sent over the internet, or does it take advantage of the medium?

The production values are very high quality as this is an expensively produced television show on the internet. In my estimation, this is a very short-sighted way of using the Internet Television technology available but a step in the right direction. I just hope ABC.com gets their player technology working better, because I cringe at the idea of having to watch Grey’s Anatomy or any of their other TV properties online again anytime soon.