MTV bills its next great thing as “the Ultimate Broadband Video Channel”, great since I love to watch music videos of Beyonce, Alicia Keyes, and even Britney do their thing. So I head on over to the site and am instantly impressed by the design mostly because of the smooth color scheme.
Then I try to read the font…I can’t…I view the CSS to see what font that is and what size they are trying to blind me with. I see the CSS and my eyes cross and my vision gets blurry. I am go blind. I quickly close the editcss window and decide that it’s time to just watch some videos.
I can’t. Why? Well it seems that using a Dual 1.8GHz G5 with Firefox simply isn’t cutting edge enough.
Detecting OS…
WE’RE SORRY!
In order to offer a broad selection of full-length music videos on-demand and free of charge, MTV Overdrive uses Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect videos from unauthorized re-distribution.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not support Windows DRM. If DRM support becomes available for Macintosh, MTV will develop a version of MTV Overdrive that works on a Mac.
So not only do I get a table-based layout with typography that could only be read by an ant, but I also can’t access the site because of proprietary technology available to only one audience. Welcome back to 1999.
Over the past year I have learned to control my anger and think things through because I figure there is always a good reason behind decisions such as these. However, I am dumbfounded on this one. Don’t need tables for the site. Don’t need typography that is unreadable. And I shouldn’t be restricted to simply using one OS, with one browser, while watching through only one media player.
Did I mention that it has a nice color scheme?
Originally posted on April 29, 2005 @ 2:36 am