Our Analysts

Online video: a mixed experience, metadata and all

By Wendy Pacheco, Jun 6, 2011

Even as cord-cutting remains a hot topic and accessing video over the Internet becomes more common, the overall online video experience still reminds us of the early, halting days of video on demand.  With technical glitches abundant and metadata in a scattered state, the overall experience with many of the top online video sites still has room to improve. Lots of room.

While user interfaces and amount of content have improved over the past several years, our detailed monitoring and reviews of top online video sites shows that users are still subjected to missing assets or website glitches that are not part of the standard linear TV viewing experience. 

A couple of examples:

• Although Dish Network offers a vast array of free and behind-the-firewall movies, we’d advise against trying to browse these movies alphabetically as the site does not allow you to move past the letter “A.”  (And the rest of the alphabet has some nice titles.)
  
  
• Netflix has signed large deals lately with several studios, but watching a TV show or movie on a weekend via the streamed service can leave users in a buffered state as the site occasionally becomes slow during peak viewing times. This technology glitch is an equal opportunity offender as it appears to happen across multiple gaming platforms along with Netflix-connected computers.       

There’s more. As consumers search a site, they may opt to sort assets by release year, hoping to find an oldie but a goodie.  Unfortunately, with title attributing a purely subjective craft for online video, that search may result in some confusion.  For example, the title From Prada to Nada is listed as having a release year of 1899 on Verizon’s Flex View online video service (!), when in reality it is a 2011 release.  And while a title may appear across multiple sites, the metadata are likely to vary.  The movie 100 Girls, for instance, has a release year of 2000 on Xfinity TV while it’s listed as 2001 on Verizon FiOS.  Without a centralized data system for housing online assets (similar to the data provided by Tribune Media Services for the linear TV guides), title descriptors across the online video providers will continue to be subjective.

So while many viewers have migrated their TV and movie viewing to an online state, they also have to be patient and tolerant of glitches they wouldn’t stand for in the legacy video environment. Either that, or go back to the old habit of picking up the remote and turning on the (living room) TV set.