ABC's MOVE Networks Player - The WORST

Like you, over the years I have had the opportunity to see technology advance, making more things possible online and offline. One of those advancements has been the increasing quality and availability of online video, including tv shows from the major networks. Unfortunately, despite these advances, certain companies have ignored the complaints and difficulties that consumers are having with the software or delivery systems that they are using. One of these companies is ABC, of the huge Disney conglomerate. ABC uses software and delivery by a company called MOVE Networks to present their shows online. In my experience, the MOVE Player has to be one of the worst online video products and/or services ever used by a major company. When viewing shows from ABC online, we constantly experience skips and other video quality issues. I know that these problems are not caused by our Internet connection which is provided through our local telephone company, Embarq. We have a DSL connection that regularly tests at above 9 Mbps. Our family also uses the ROKU Player for viewing movies from Netflix, and I can tell you that we have no problems with skipping, hesitation, or video quality with Netflix. Nor do we have any problems when playing games online or viewing videos from other sites like CNN, YouTube, Atom, Sundance Channel. ABC needs to get serious about their online video services if they expect to keep viewers. There are simply too many other options for quality entertainment online than to suffer with mediocre services like those provided by ABC.

Technorati Tags: abc, disney, dsl, embarq, internet, move networks, move player, netflix, roku, roku player, software, video quality

ROKU - Customer Service Done Correctly

I am writing this blog in praise of ROKU and one of their employees, "Josh." (I don't think that is his real name.) Although Josh and his associates did not resolve my problem (I solved it on my own), I am very impressed at the lengths to which Josh and members of the technical department went in order to help me. The technical department followed up with a call when Josh said they would. After telling the technical department that I had found a solution, they did not simply close the case. They asked me specifically what I did and took note of it so that they could help others who might be experiencing the same difficulty. But, the story does not end there. Josh called the following day asking if the technical department had called and if my problem had been resolved. AMAZING!!!! Real people providing real customer service, taking ownership of the customer's problem as their own, holding themselves and others in the company accountable; this is what customer service is supposed to be. Thank you, Josh and ROKU! You have earned a loyal customer.

4 NETFLIX® Priority Codes Up For Grabs

I just received 4 NETFLIX Priority Codes cards to give away. They are redeemable for another week (until October 31, 2008) for a free one month trial to NETFLIX service. We have been very happy with the service thus far and recently installed the "ROKU Player" that allows you to view some of the movies available through NETFLIX on your TV. The player connects to your television and receives movies from NETFLIX over your broadband service via a connection to your router.

After a few hiccups, we were able to get the service working with our "old" router - a D-link Dl-614+ router. For some reason, the ROKU player was hijacking the IP address of my HP laptop, so I was not able to connect to the Internet when the ROKU player was connected. Updating the driver for my laptop's Broadcom adapter did not help, but updating the Broadcom's WLAN utility did. For some reason the new version of the Broadcom WLAN utility is able to reserve an IP address for my laptop with my router and keep the ROKU player from taking it.

Anyway, back to the NETFLIX Priority Codes - if you are one of the first four people to reply to this post, I will provide you with a code and the URL to activate your free month.