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It took how long? 22 April 2004 Edition
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It seems to be a month for big new website releases in the .nz domain and the most recent such event is the christening of TVNZ's replacement for its NZoom portal site.

Given all the build-up, the resources being thrown at it, and promises associated with this site I've got to say I'm not as impressed as I'd hoped I'd be.

Visually it's relatively clean but it drives my non-IE browser into fits of apoplexy while it loads, with parts of the page flashing quite disconcertingly for over 10 seconds -- and that's at DSL speeds. In fact, this strobe-like loading makes the site totally unpleasant to use with Firebird (and I assume Mozilla/Firefox is the same).

For some reason, the "What's On TV" Flash portions of the page just sit there saying "please wait... Loading What's On". Obviously there's nothing on because they've been loading for over 5 minutes now.

Clicking on one of the video links brings up another browser window with a tiny version of Windows Media player embedded in it -- but for whatever reason, it refuses to let me change the size of the postage-stamp-sized (on my hi-res monitor) image. Why oh why can't we be given the option of using the stand-alone player with its much greater flexibility????


The Aardvark PC-Based Digital
Entertainment Centre Project

Yes, at last, this feature has been updated again! (31 Mar 2003)

I tried clicking on the "Video Help" link but that simply resulted in a timeout. In fact the whole damned site was unacceptably slow and unreliable this morning. Clicking on the "NEWS" tab also gave a timeout.

On this page we're told that the site has been a year in development -- at goodness knows what cost.

Surely they could have included a bit more testing in those 12 months?

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Or is it that old "most people just use IE" problem again?

And, apart from a cosmetically different presentation, what's the difference between this new site and the old NZoom one?

Quite frankly I'm left scratching my head in an attempt to work out what's really new rather than repainted.

Even though the Flash applets that are supposed to provide the daily programme listings refuse to load on my system (maybe I've only got Flash 6 installed?), there is HTML version but for some reason it seems to think that today is still Wednesday so I have to sit through that tedious flashing and blinking twice if I want to see what's on.

TVNZ's parochial attitudes also show insomuch as the programme listings only link to other pages on the TVNZ website. What's wrong with including links to the best fan sites for some of the overseas programmes?

I'm sorry but this site might be just the bee's knees for those who use IE and who weren't expecting very much from 12 months development work but it leaves me cold.

It seems that all we've got here is a none-too-extreme makeover that delivers far too little and makes no allowances for those of us who aren't 100% Microsoft or who would like just a little more than mutton dressed up as lamb.

With all the content, promotional power and intellectual property rights that TVNZ has access too, it's a damned shame to see that (once again) they haven't taken full advantage of those assets to produce a killer website.

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