Greed
I love the Office, it’s a terrifically funny show. On the flip side, I hate NBC, the propagators of the show. I don’t really ever catch Live TV anymore, with iTunes and PVR’s what’s the point? I’m actually used to watching shows on my computer, and have recently started enjoying them on my iPhone. However, last year NBC got greedy. They wanted more than $1.99 for their shows, they wanted $3.99. So they pulled ALL their shows from iTunes.
The Office is back now, and I’ve missed the past few weeks and I’m stuck watching them on a worse quality, ad-plastered ‘Beta’ web video player. Last season it was one 30 second ad placed at about 4 breaks in the show. Just like TV, the ad was louder than the show, so you always seemed to blow your speakers. And, even worse, it was generally the same lame ad all 4 times. But I put up with it.
Now, they’ve added TWO ads in the breaks. LAME + 1. NBC is really sucking it up now. I did notice, however, that they give you an option to download the episode, so I click on it. OOPS, PC and WMP 11 ONLY, not supported on Apple or Linux. From my end-user, customer point of view, NBC has quickly become one of the worst managed company in the public domain. I was more than happy to pay $2 an episode to have a nice, high quality, commercial free episode of the Office to watch when I wanted, over and over again. Now, it’s more of a chore, and I don’t look forward to watching one of my favorite shows.
Greed takes over. Customers get forgotten. This really can’t go on forever though… the old, ancient windbags that run these major corporations have to kick over someday, and I only hope that a tech-savvy, modern person takes over that understands the new world of the web. Ugh. NBC sucks. I’m not a fan.