This afternoon I spent some time evaluating the video-based services of online news sites, particularly from the perspective of someone living outside of North America.

CNN - first I clicked on the button for paid premium service. Not what I want even at $2.95 a month, though I’m sure that price is low enough to get a lot of people to sign up.

Then I went to the non-paid service. The video displayed but no sound. I selected another news item which gave me a message that my Windows Media Player needed to be upgraded to version 9. So I click on the link CNN gives me to download the latest update. I get an error message saying that Firefox can’t connect to the page. Sorry, CNN, too much trouble, you lose, I’m going to the next news service, bye.

But, wait, just to see what would happen, I selected the option to proceed to the CNN video without downloading the latest Windows Media Player. It’s not bad but not great. But CNN warned me that it might not be so great without the newer player. After a slow start the audio was fine. The video wasn’t continuous, more like a series of still images but perhaps that was because of the codec. At least, it wasn’t jerky. The image quality was quite good. So, I’ll try it a little more and see if I can ever get that latest download from Microsoft.

ABC News: they have their premium news service, also. Sign up is rather complicated, a lot of options. Then it says that the premium service is available free to subscribers of the “flowing services“. What the hell is a flowing service? Is that some new net jargon that I’ve missed or did they misspell “following”. The services listed are comcast, aol, bellsouth, sbcyahoo, verizon.

I check into ABC news site several times a week but how many times are they going to keep highlighting the Sheryl Crow talks about her cancer video?

So, now for the free video from ABC. The player tells me to download Flash player 8 or above, sigh. Why can’t watching all online video be as easy as watching YouTube?

Ok, so I follow the link from the ABC site to the Adobe site where I download the installer for Flash player 9. I’m excited….Shit, I have to close Firefox to install the player…need to save this post you’re now reading in WordPress…can’t Adobe install the player, restart Firefox automatically and return you to all the same pages and tabs that you had open? Seem like I’ve seen some installers that do that, no?

It’s later in the day and I now see a link to the ABC World News webcast. There’s a 15 second commercial before the webcast…ok…this looks pretty good. I’ll try to remember watching.

The link for the RSS feed is more prominent on the ABC World News page than at CNN. The feed also includes enclosure tags for the video and not just news headlines. I’m going to monitor both the CNN and ABC news feeds for a few days and see which one I find more useful.

I like having the less than half-hour nightly world news program available as a webcast. While there are a lot of individual videos on these news site, I (being lazy) prefer a package. Yes, that limits the news that I learn about but I don’t have to spend time choosing. Also, on the individual segments it’s hard to know whether those are current items or segments that have been online for a week or more.

I’ll look at some of the other news services in part 2 in a few days or so. Meanwhile, I’ll see how ABC and CNN work for me.