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Today I read two inter­est­ing post­ings about PBS and the new reli­gion — stream­ing media — broad­cast­ing Hulu style.

Seems that when PBS decided to do a deal with Hulu awhile back they were only test­ing the waters. Some of their shows Nova, Wired Sci­ence, Car­rier and Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Fron­tiers, went up with com­mer­cials. That was all han­dled by their money-making arm PBS Ven­tures; don’t want to mess with that not-for-profit status.

PBS has been mov­ing into the dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing space and cre­at­ing rev­enue mod­els that have brought home the cash. First mak­ing some of their shows avail­able at their web­site, a great way to test inter­est. Then a chan­nel on YouTube. And they appar­ently do a brisk busi­ness on iTunes accord­ing to the NYTimes.

The exper­i­ment with Hulu obvi­ously has proved suc­cess­ful and they have launched their own video space at pbs.org

I pointed my browser over to PBS to see exactly what they had done. What kind of inter­face and advertising/sponsorship model they had point in place.

When you get to the pbs.org wel­come screen the video is behind just another gray but­ton Watch Episodes, no spe­cial treat­ment. You click and get a less than excit­ing selec­tor. Not an invit­ing inter­face. Where’s all the cool stuff? There is some­thing very unPBS-like about this black inter­face too. Try­ing to be too cool? The inter­ac­tion is clumsy and the video has arti­facts and pix­e­lates at full screen view. It uses a stacked index card selec­tor, a poor imi­ta­tion of cov­er­flow by Apple. There are plenty out of the box inter­face con­trols that would have made this site eas­ier to use.

Of course this is a beta so some things can be flakey. But usu­ally you don’t see major func­tions of visual pre­sen­ta­tion chang­ing at this stage of devel­op­ment. That’s too bad because every­thing feels wrong about this site.

You have to select from two drop­down menues. Sorry but there is plenty of avail­able space to make some kind of offer­ing to me.

This what I had expected to see. Maybe some­thing was broken?

Nav­i­gat­ing required click­ing on the nar­row space betwwen the stacked imags. Hard tar­get. Selected the wrong thing sev­eral times.

The same selec­tion device at the show level. Hard tar­get. Dumb.