Some days ago ABC released their Internet TV project. The website tries to bring an experience similar to the Apple TV/Windows Media Centre, with fully featured menus and metadata on the video clips. The default behaviour for the video player is to be in full-screen, a clue that maybe ABC is interested in people that want to use their computers as TV appliances and not the user that watches TV while replying an e-mail in the same box.

Flash Video is probably the best way to broadcast media over the Internet these days but I can’t think of why someone would use Flash for the whole website. Even though flash files are now indexable by Google and Yahoo! it’s not delivering any fancy graphic resource XHTML wouldn’t deliver and has a terrible user experience.

The video has acceptable quality but something that really amazes me is how much bandwidth the site consumes apart from the video itself. The Flash site loads a lot of XML files via GET calls to assemble even the simplest menu and uses caching poorly.

According to Firebug, to render only the main menu –6 options, icons and text, no video at all- it loads 912kb, and from those only 88kb are cacheable in the browser. No wonder they recommend 1.1 Mpbs for optimal performance. The problem is that broadband is a very expensive resource in Australia. It costs about AUD$80.00/month for 1500kpbs and it’s capped at 25GB/month.

Looks like images, JavaScript and the SWF file itself are cached but the XML files used to assemble the player are not. Those files look like this:

 

 Having spent most of his professional life wandering the globe in search of paradise, travel  writer and prodigal son Art Watkins rushes home, too late, to be by the bedside of his dying mother
.
 
 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/eastofeverything/
 http://www.abc.net.au/tv/eastofeverything/#/Watch/

Now given that a TV Show name and info do not change very often I really see no reason for not caching these XML files.

It’s nice to see major TV channels doing something new on the Internet anyway. The Media market in Australia kind of frustrates me, major TV channels have only the usual text-and-some-clips web platform.