NBC Says - Don’t watch our shows online, ever!

NBC “Video Rewind” sucks. We missed 10 minutes of the office on TV last night, so tonight we went to nbc.com to watch those first 10 minutes. Was it to much to hope for that their online episodes were as easy to watch as ABC’s? Apparently, yes. NBC is completely incapable of delivering video online. It would have been much easier to download it over bit-torrent. Also, the little bit of the video that did load was at the wrong aspect ratio. Widescreen squeezed into a 4:3 player. Weak. Commercials load and play just fine, they are even larger than the video provided for the actual show. In fact I’ve sat here writing this while waiting for NBC’s crappy video player to buffer, of course I have no idea if it is buffering, because there is no busy indication or loading bar.

And I would try to submit a complaint to NBC, but that is entirely impossible. I’ve looked before, all you can find online is a general survey form that offers no field for comments or questions. So, they want to prevent you from watching their shows on their website through their new video player, and you can’t let them know when it doesn’t work. So here I am… here we are… fun.

Oh, and yes, I’m on windows, and I tried both IE and Fire Fox. Same problems in both.