Saturday, May 06, 2006

A Probable Conspiracy

As you probably heard, CBS has launched something called Innertube, which will play old TV shows, with commercials, and other stuff, which this week includes a special Pearl Jam concert.

OK, I thought, I'll try it out. CBS was very good with the NCAA tournament broadcast, I was able to watch several games from here. I especially liked the "Buzzer Beaters" section, which let you view the last 2:00 of close games.

But when I try Innertube here, I get the nice little message:

The Innertube Broadband player requires the latest version of Macromedia Flash player.

I've seen this before, including on Comcast's Home Page. The key word here is latest, by which they mean Flash Player 8.0. Unfortunately, Flash for Linux is stuck at version 7.0, and not only will version 8.0 never be released for Linux, the upcoming version 8.5 "will ship after the Windows and Mac versions."

Humph. OK, CBS has a helpful link for sending feedback on there web pages. So I wrote them a nice note, pointed out that I watch things like CSI and tend to buy stuff, so please consider going back to the system that worked for the NCAA tournament, which I assume was Flash 7.

I hit send. And got this:

CGI Error
The application that you were attempting to run has aborted.
    
A diagnostic message has been sent to the development team.
Thank you for your patience as they fix this problem.

In other words, I can't even complain.

0 comments: