We are the web site of NBC News, and the primary goal of our new video player is to help you experience the stories you want to see when you want to see them. We want you to have a terrific experience watching Nightly News in the morning or TODAY tonight or Meet the Press on Tuesday.
So when our editor-in-chief asked me how this blog post was coming a few days ago, I told her what I still believe: Our product should communicate itself.
The video should be big and crisp but reliably load at the speed with which NBC News crews deploy to cover stories around the world. You should be able to quickly find what you want, whatever it is: Anne Thompson on what may be the death march of the penguins, Brian Williams and Keith Olbermann on the steroid scandal rocking baseball, Willie Geist satirizing the news on our very own ZeitGeist vlog, or Hoda Kotb on why women love geeks. And, for you technologically adventurous types, you should be able to watch Hoda’s geek love package on the widest possible array of operating systems and modern browsers, including Safari, Firefox, Flock, Camino, Opera and Omniweb. You will need Flash 9 if you don't already have it installed, and JavaScript must be enabled.
Here’s some more enticement to go watch good video clips (and play with the player) instead of reading this: Dawna Friesen reports, exclusively for nightly.msnbc.com, on a Nairobi man’s dream come true. CNBC’s Power Lunch team learns what it takes to rent a Lamborghini. Chris Matthews wonders if the writer’s strike is giving presidential hopefuls a late-night free ride. Countdown’s Oddball, meanwhile, has an electric eel powering a Christmas tree.
If you've clicked on one of the links above and come back, I'm sure you've noticed that, despite all of the thoughtful feedback you've given us over the years, we still have advertising in our video player. A few notes on that: First, my cat needs to eat. Second, and far more importantly, it's not free for NBC News to gather important news in difficult places. Third, look for some real viewer-centric innovation on this front soon.
Still reading about the player instead of playing? Here’s a compromise: get all meta and let msnbc.com’s Dara Brown guide you through our new player, from within the player.
If you’re still here, below are some tips on what you should check out when you finally do go watch some clips.
When you launch a video, the list of thumbnails and headlines to the left of the player is your current playlist. You can scroll it and click on a thumbnail to switch to that video, or click the little blue + sign to add it to “My playlist.”
To the left of the playlist is the navigation, where you can browse for the videos you want. Up top are, um, top videos, then most viewed videos, weird news and the playlist you have started to create with the little blue + sign. Below that are categories that match the sections of our site, from U.S. news to Travel. Click on the “Entertainment” button to get the latest clips in that category — or roll over it and click “latest clips” to get the same list, or navigate right to topics like “Television” or franchises like Countdown’s “Keeping Tabs” or clips from Access Hollywood. The navigation works the same way under “Shows,” where you can browse clips by the NBC News broadcasts they come from.
The related links and controls below the player should be pretty intuitive, but you may be a bit surprised when you click the full-screen button, which is my favorite part of our new experience. The overlays you first see at the bottom — the controls — and the left — the navigation — will disappear, but you can always bring them back by mousing over the bottom or left of your screen. In other words, you keep all of the goodness of the player controls and navigation without leaving the full-screen experience:
You’ll notice at the top right that there’s a “Beta” tag. Here’s why:
1. We are aware of a few glitches with the player but suspect that you might find some more in the coming weeks. All of the research, focus groups, hallway conversations, designing, engineering, doughnuts and testing in the world don’t guarantee full success in the wild world we work in. So we ask you first for a liberal dose of feedback and second for a pinch of patience as we keep cranking to get this as perfect as we can.
2. We’re still chasing in some very important details. Namely: Search (you can, of course, search for our video in the fine interface at MSN Video, our parent and steadfast partner), Embed (coming soon, we promise) and Live (for a little while, at least, our Live video will play outside of this experience).
Please send us feedback and comment away.
