Some rants, some tech, some random thoughts…

You know how your own publication has jeered at the networks for BLARING commercials, while they (the networks) claim that they can’t do anything about it? We all know that they can, of course…do something about it. Even I know how to normalize audio across multiple sources. Well shame on you, TV Guide. Not only do the pre-roll commercials you run on tvguide.com’s Videos section SCREAM at an unreasonable volume, but you’ve also prevented visitors from pausing the commercials, you’ve prevented visitors from changing the volume of the commercial*, and you completely ignore visitors’ volume selection for videos, reverting to the previously-mentioned unreasonable volume when playing each new commercial. Seriously? Tonight was my first and last visit to your new Videos section.

*It’s worth mentioning how poorly you’ve implemented the volume control for commercials. I’ve noticed that you don’t actually prevent me from attempting to change the volume. Indeed, I can click the volume icon and move the slider. In response, however, not only do you not change the volume, but you pop up another browser window that, in some browsers, displays an error message. Sloppy. Really sloppy. Your customers expect and deserve better.

I encountered problems when I attempted to submit this feedback online at tvguide.com. The customer support section requires that you select a feedback category [note that it doesn’t tell you this…it just requires it]. Since there isn’t a category appropriate for web site or online video content, I didn’t select one. In Internet Explorer, I received this error:
We are having a technical problem. Please try later.

In Firefox, absolutely nothing happens when you click Submit. Nothing – categories selected or not. Nice error-checking, team…very nice.