Which do you prefer: content or bandwidth?
Entertainment companies are expanding their content offerings onto the Web as quickly as startup companies will accept their money. NBC’s baffling investment in Cnet’s Snap is one of the more recent examples. But the feeling you get from these early sites is boredom. All you do is wait.
You can’t help but wonder whether anyone designing or programming these sites has ever been on the Web or viewed it with less than a dedicated T3 connection. It’s still a 28.8 world for most people connecting to the Internet from home. ISDN, ADSL and cable modems have small market shares which will be expanding in the coming years, but currently if you want to provide entertainment over the Web, it had better work at 28.8.
Entertainment companies might argue that they’re just anticipating the future when highly interactive sites will look as outstanding on the average computer as on the machines used to design them. But by the time the rest of us have such access, local machines will be exponentially faster; therefore, continuing the gap. And the point is to present sites that are entertaining now, not five years
from now.
Disney’s turgid moves into new media whose offerings serve as a fair representation of how old electronic media is trying to bend new media to its shape. Their “interactive books” with sound chips make every character sound the same and their slow CD-ROMs have Winnie the Pooh climbing the honey tree for what seems like weeks.
Disney’s online offerings are growing: it controls the Starwave development firm, the InfoSeek search service, various parent-related sites and has launched its own InfoSeek-like search engine for kids called the Disney Internet Guide. But where they’re failing is in the creativity corner.
For example, Disney Blast, a kids site that offers interactive games and adventures, is unusable at any speed under 128K (dual-band ISDN). Installing the software on a machine with such a connection can take nearly half an hour (a child would never wait so long) and occasional required upgrades to the service take equally as long to download.
I let two children, aged eight and six (the service’s target audience) experiment with Disney Blast. They hated it. Neither of them spent more than 12 minutes with the service before giving up. Perhaps the older one was insulted by quizzes such as this one:
Bambi’s father is called
a. Bambo the Wonder Deer
b. Ol’ Stickhead
c. The Great Prince of the Forest
d. The Deer Formerly Known as Prince
The younger child searched for something that interested him, looking for activities while gaudy pages slowly loaded. Finally, he arrived at a greeting-card application, but was frustrated when the printed-out page didn’t resemble what was promised on the screen. Neither child has asked to use Disney Blast again.
Disney has too much marketing clout not to dominate whatever entertainment market it enters, but the company’s current offerings suggest that any creative breakthroughs online will occur elsewhere.
Right now, unless someone gives you a T3 line for your birthday, before you and your kids can be entertained, you’ll have to wait and wait and wait . . .
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Are you being entertained online? We want to know.(views@vineyard.com)
