Sometimes I come across a site and have to wonder what the designers, consultants, marketers, management teams and everyone else involved were thinking when they signed off on the project. The sting is that much worse when it’s a re-design of a well-loved site.

Well, the brains behind the new BBC iPlayer layout have failed, miserably! The new design is cluttered and lacks the wonderful functionality of the older sidebar. Its ease of use is completely gone in favour of… something? I have no idea what benefit the new layout brings. There is no additional feature set. It doesn’t DO anything different.

I have two major concerns with it:

1. It’s cluttered.

The benefit of the original iPlayer was an ease of use and elegant design. It was simple to find a programme, easy to play it, and easy to find related content. They have now juxtaposed radio and television programming, littered the screen with unfathomable boxes, and made the filtering by category bloody difficult. Its main content doesn’t fit above the fold, making its screen real-estate poorly-used even though there is much more content on display at one time. The wonderfully-simple method of sidebar filtering is gone in favour of some myspace-esque scatter-box setup. It’s complicated, un-elegant, and supremely difficult to use.

Poor effort, badly done.

2. It’s ugly. I know this is subjective, but the actual player doesn’t fit well in its space.

Blogging about politics can be a bit of a mixed bag, so we’ll see how it goes. I want to avoid polarising talk, tabloid tactics, and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Instead, I’d like to discuss the latest raft of changes which seek to make immigrants ‘more British’ before offering them citizenship.

Personal Perspective

First, and as a matter of context: I am an immigrant. I was born and raised in Colorado, USA, and have lived in the UK for the last 5 years or so. My national identity, however, is a more complicated matter. I resonate politically better with Britain than the United States. I admire more British personages than American (probably due to the fact that the only great Americans I can think to name are either dead or long dead…). I laugh at British comedians, and listen to Radio 4. I queue. I share the occasional withering glance  with my fellow public transport passengers whenever a tourist declares loudly that something is cute or quaint. I even say: "Oh, excuse me, sorry" when someone else runs into me at Sainsburys, and I say "Cheers" or "Ta" even when someone should be thanking me.

This has put me in an interesting position at times. I have been part of conversations when the other party doesn’t actually know, or momentarily forgets, that I grew up singing The Star-Spangled Banner before watching baseball.

"Well, I think Americans are rude and ignorant".

Watching TV online is becoming a bit of a hobby of mine.  I don’t have a TV anywhere in the house, and it is just so much more convenient to be able to watch what I want, when I do, without  having to play around with channels or digital interfaces which seem built to be slow (i.e. digital TV). Early efforts to watch online were riddled with frustration. I trialled Joost along with however many millions of others who signed up for a Beta invite, but found the system clunky and without real appeal in the frankly poor content. Also, it was a memory hog and froze my then-ageing Dell. There was also the problem with pirates and ‘linked TV’ Not only is there the conscience to console, but one popular link site, tv-links.co.uk, actually landed its founder in prison. YouTube only provides short clips, or pirated episodes which are quickly removed by moderators.

So, where does that leave the casual TV-watcher? With all the early difficulty of installing software, finding Betas, or perusing content which either didn’t work or you didn’t want to play, it seemed that watching tv-quality content online has always been a struggle. With new improvements, though, can you actually watch TV online easily and relatively free from frustration? I think it’s getting there.

UK TV Online

First, I’d like to note that I will be avoiding Hulu and any discussion of it aside from mentioning that it doesn’t work in the UK. Both of the services reviewed below, to be fair to US readers, currently only work in the UK.