Warning: Two marketing posts back-to-back, you guys. I’m sorry.
I don’t watch a lot of TV on an actual TV these days and most of the TV that I do watch is time-shifted. We live in the future, you know. Instead, I watch a lot of programming on my iPad. Between Hulu and Netflix and iTunes, there’s not a whole lot that I need to miss if I’m content to wait a day (or 8 days, in the case of some Fox programming). I even sat and caught up on The Office the last time I got my oil changed by watching on my phone. Again, we live in the future. I hate to invoke the Apple mantra, but we live in a world where stuff just works.
Which is why it’s easy to forget that there are some platforms that make it truly difficult to complete their users’ intended goal. But I got a reminder about that very thing when I tried to watch last week’s episode of Leverage on my laptop. TNT’s video player is maybe the worst one that I’ve used in the past year.
Here’s what it looks like:
I also have to say, before I get going on UX, that the quality of the video player itself was downright impractical. It took me over an hour to watch 42 minutes of television because of how frequently the stream had to buffer, buffer, buffer.
When I landed on this page, the most immediate thing I noticed was that I couldn’t watch the video without logging in. Not to TNT.tv – to my DirecTV account. I’d understand the former, even though that’s another hoop erected for the user to jump through to do the thing he or she wants to do. Every time you put up one of those hoops, more visitors leave in frustration. I’m currently three steps into a funnel and I’m being hit with one more hoop that I didn’t anticipate.
Fortunately, I know my DirecTV password. But the only reason I have it at-hand in my brain is that I just set up the Cartoon Network app on my tablet (so I can watch Batman: the Brave and the Bold episodes, mostly), and getting that to happen necessitated me resetting the password and setting a new one, because that’s how frequently we use these logins, how infrequently we have come to use logins in general.
Ideally, adding your content to another channel should be about increasing the reach of that content, democratizing it and making it accessible to new eyes. Or, in this case, it’s maybe about ensuring that the only people who can view your content are the same people who can already access it elsewhere. That seems backwards, doesn’t it?
The irony is that users without connected accounts can only watch the clips, the behind-the-scenes stuff, the stuff that the committed fan wants to watch. Would it be smarter to give the episodes to everyone, and restrict access to the bonus content? Most people don’t want it, but enough of the ones who do are likely willing to give TNT a premium, in this case in the form of entering an external login.
I can’t castigate TNT for this solely, since it’s something that I’m seeing more and more of. Hell, even as a Hulu Plus subscriber, I also need to subscribe to Dish Network in order to get some shows with next-day availability. This is the sort of corporate behavior that encourages piracy – the creation of a subset of users whose want for the content is not equal to their willingness to give the faceless entity that acts as its gatekeeper the toll it asks for. This is a decision that has nothing to do with human users; it’s another reminder that, though we may like to think so, we are not actually the customers of these companies and that we are, in fact, part of the product.
But that’s a tangent. The screen that you’re on while you watch this video buffer is a mess. The bottom of the screen has an ad space that is half below the fold on my screen and that isn’t somewhere where anybody is going to even pay attention to it. I’d love to see clickthrough rates on that ad spot, or even an eye tracking study. Next to that ad is a recommendation that I watch Rizzoli & Isles. I’m skeptical of how well this kind of cross-sell works. After all, if I wanted to watch Rizzoli & Isles, I’d be on that landing page watching them tell me to watch Leverage or Falling Skies or whatever. While people that watch a lot of physical TV are prone to couch potato behavior, with lots of flipping between shows and back and forth, the Internet TV viewer is often more single-purpose. Less “I want to see what’s on” and more “I want to watch Once Upon A Time right now.” That’s loyalty to an intellectual property. I doubt there are a lot of people who just say to themselves “I’m a big fan of TNT – I’m just going to surf over there and see what they’ve got.” Maybe that’s just me, though I doubt it.
What TNT could be doing on this page is upselling me on things related to the episode I’m watching. Maybe some DVDs (that is the dream, right? That someone watching online converts into a purchaser)? Maybe a second-screen app that’s exclusive to the show I’m watching? Maybe an attempt to attract viewers to the site’s community?
Maybe something more like this?
This layout takes up the same rough space as the existing one and targets it toward fans of the show with a bit more precision. The login call-to-action is placed directly beneath the video here, presenting a much smaller profile while still being a constant reminder to anyone watching the video player without being logged in (and also, in my wishful thinking scenario where the login gates off bonus content instead of full episodes, it creates some continuity between the content they’re viewing and the content that’s incentivized).
I think that’s a little better, a little more focused. I could be wrong, of course. What do you think? How would you redesign a screen like this?
