Click here to watch me bitch!

The BBQ Pit
1

It seems I can’t win. I used to be slightly annoyed that CNN didn’t have any free videos on its site - you had to sign up, (and install Real Player, if I remember correctly) and pay an admittedly minimal fee to watch any videos that accompanied news stories. Sometimes videos add a lot of dimension to a story, especially when it’s of a particularly visual nature, so I’d usually just head over to a site like MSNBC, where more often than not, I’d find a video.

But now, they do have some free videos. I should be happy, right? No, because now, in the middle of their news stories, they like to add “Click here to watch this person explain some part of their story” links, and refuse to just add to the copy that I would have seen if I had watched the video. It’s frustrating, and it’s annoying. Half the time, the video stops halfway through the stream. Their player can’t figure out that I have Windows Media Player 10 (probably because I use Firefox), and it can’t seem to remember that I’ve told them several times to just go ahead an play the goddam video. And if I’m reading a fucking article, I shouldn’t HAVE to watch a video to get the full story. Just give me the gist of what’s in the video, and I’ll decide if I want to watch it.

What really, really annoys me is when there’s no article at all - just “Click here to hear about this!” Screw you; if it’s newsworthy enough to be on the front page of your fucking website, take two seconds to write up a goddamned article!

Examples: http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/02/09/sex.harass.ap/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/09/yemen.navy/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/09/bush.terror/index.html
I can’t link to any examples of my second complaint, but there are currently two examples on the front page of the international edition at www.cnn.com

Fuckers.

2

I agree with you 100%. It used to bother me that you had to subscribe and pay to view their videos, but not that much.

Now when I see an interesting story on the front page that I’d like to read, I can’t. All they have is a “watch” link. You can’t just read the story, you have to watch and listen to it.

This is especially annoying if I’m at work, and decide to click on the link, because then I have to dig out my headphones to keep from annoying my neighbors.

CNN, I also pit you.

3

That kind of thing bugs me too. Worse is the story I’m actually interested in reading, but it hasn’t even been written up - just a video link, nothing else.

In cases like this, I use the Firefox IE Tab extension. It allows you to view pages in Internet Explorer without having to open a new window for IE. The IE pages show up as regular tabs in Firefox.

4

And even worse than that is when some idiot on the SDMB (i.e. me) reads nothing more than the first and last lines of the previous post, then proceeds to unintentionally repeat the unread middle part. :smack: Sorry about that, FatBaldGuy.