Shoot the geeks

October 10, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis

I have been trying all day to watch 18 Doughty Street, the new British online political network. I have installed no end of needless crap on my Mac and on Firefox. I have tried to watch it in Firefox, Safari, and IE. And nothing works. I tried to leave them a comment but they made me go through some complex registration process. I tried to send them email but the link was broken. Arrrrggghhh. They have made this needlessly, stupidly complicated. I just one a few seconds to play. But it made a horrible buzzing noise, then lost its sound, then froze. Never put technology in the hands of pols. Damned disaster.

  • http://epeus.blogspot.com Kevin Marks

    The problem is them choosing Microsoft software, unlike every succesful hosting service. They should have just used an existing video hosting service.

  • RonP

    the layout is hideous. i am not quite sure what they thought they were trying to achieve.

  • Pingback: Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Fluffy links October 11th 2006

  • http://blog.handelsblatt.de/indiskretion Thomas Knuewer

    The layout is a jungle – but the streaming works perfectly here in Germany, even though I’m behind a fire wall whicht is normally more solid than the chinese wall.

  • http://www.pickledpolitics.com leon

    If that didn’t float your boat perhaps this might be more to your liking: http://www.theknivesareout.com/

  • Pingback: 18 Doughty Street » What The Blogs Say After The First Day

  • http://epeus.blogspot.com Kevin Marks

    Jeff, You set me off on a rant about Flash video too.
    Geeks can be bad, but to really screw things up you need marketers after lock-in.

  • http://www.truegritz.com/ Pauline Ashley-Wilkes

    Oh dear. That is the most butt-ugly site I’ve ever laid eyes on! Stick with those good ‘ole southern gals of TrueGritz for a much better time.

  • http://bodmas.org/ KeithB

    I’m in Safari, I followed the link in your article, clicked on live feed on the 18 Doughty St site, and had video and sound in about 5 seconds – the geezer is going on about community policing and the prison issues.

    Pop up blocking is off, I’m on DSL from Orange in the UK, I do have the current flash player and the flip4mac plug in for quicktime installed. Hope you get your system sorted.

    I rather like the Web site – big bold text and clear links – but then I have no design sense at all according to the missus who is a designer.

  • PJ

    I just tried to watch live streaming of NHL games on Yahoo. It kept asking me to login and it re-booted the feed every few seconds before going black.

    If you have any windows users with XP, one option is to download Windows Media Player 11 beta 2:
    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx

    Other users can try Media Player Classic, which is a catchall for a lot of different formats:
    http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_players/media_player_classic.cfm

    Good luck.

  • http://unbeknownst.net KirkH

    Jeff, saw this and had to post this on your site. The backlash has begun. Have a look at this horrendous speech by P. Diddy about “buying” a channel on YouTube.
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=XLcPIolG_8E

    Now look at this unfamous person’s reponse to his disturbing promotion.
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=ES6kSKGv7dA

    Her video stats:
    Views: 534,196
    Comments: 2025
    Favorited: 670 times
    Honors: 20 show

    That’s street justice.

  • http://www.rosenblumtv.com Michael Rosenblum

    Jeff
    I can see it here in Singapore, but it is probably better when you can’t see it. the buildup was great, 100 cameras, cuting edge, webcasting.

    When I look at it, it is TERRIBLE!

    The content is TERRIBLE!

    It looks like BBC 1962.

    22 year old in suits and ties in swivel chairs having endless boingly dead politcal discussions, all seemingly shot with fixed cameras and lit and put through a switcher. For webcast!!

    Talk about ‘don’t get it’.

    TERRIBLE! Better you can’t download.

  • http://www.18doughtystreet.com iain dale

    Isn’t it funny how virtually everyone else reports no problem in streaming the site? Have you ever thought it could be something to do with your computer, rather than at our end. Obviously when you start something like this there are always a few teething problems and we are sorting them out, but for 98% of people it seems to work fine.

    What email did you use? Send something to me at iain AT 18doughtstreet DOT com and I will get our technical people to look at it.

  • http://jvon.multiply.com jvon

    Live streaming works fine here (XP Pro). Streaming of old content does not; for some reason it causes WinAmp to launch, which has no idea what to do with the file.

    Personally I do not fiddle with the config of my desktop machine to view websites as a matter of policy. If everyone did that, I’d spend all day fiddling.

  • Pingback: Tim Worstall

  • http://www.18doughtystreet.com iain dale

    As Tim W helpfully points out, I missed out a Y in my email address. It’s iain AT 18doughtystreet DOT com

  • http://www.di2.nu/blog.htm Francis

    The streams seem to require Microsoft Media Player – ideally embedded in your browser. This rules me out since for a whole variaty of technical, security, DRM-allergic and basic hate microsoft reasons I have the most minimal media player I can get away with and I refuse to let that unreliable insecure piece of junk run anything automatically in my browser anyway.

    Mind you I don’t know that that is the case for sure because there is no technical FAQ that might help explain whether or not that is the case, but seeing as what I’m being asked to look at is a video/x-ms-wmx one that seems pretty certain to be the case.

    I wouldn’t have thought it would be too much trouble to dig up an alternative (almost any alternative) streaming platform so that there would be a couple of ways to view content.

  • Julian Morrison

    I can stream on Linux with mplayer, which may also exist on OS X. However, you may be seeing the result of a server-side glitch: 18DS tends to transmit absolutely nothing, rather than a holding pattern, when they’re not transmitting content. When i tried to stream before the show began i got the same symptom, a second of bzzk! and the stream stopped.