Critique of Web designs

CNN Interactive

Cole: OK, next up we'll do CNN Interactive. I was blown away when this site opened up. I felt this was a perfect marriage -- we'll talk a little bit about a TV-Web site marriage a little bit later -- but I felt this was a perfect marriage of a news gathering organization and a medium. I think that CNN Interactive is just absolutely killer. Let's pull down our latest O.J. Simpson story. This was posted about 12 hours ago. Of course the trial has only been underway for 15 more minutes today, so this is the latest information on the trial. We have links to both sounds and video. I pre-loaded some video just to show you the kinds of things that they have available. Here's Johnnie Cochran.

I think that the ability to have these realtime, or as realtime as we can get right now with the Web, video clips are wonderful. Of course, I do surf the Web at home at 14.4. There's no way on God's green earth I would try to download a 2.5 megabyte QuickTime file to watch something that I could just see on CNN. But I think that once again, as Jonathan said earlier about bandwidth, we're going to be in a constantly improving bandwidth area and in that case, as a Web provider, you're going to have to provide not only HTML, not only JPEG, but also movies and audio. And CNN has really grasped this, grasped it very well, very early on. The video is integral to the site, and I think that this is just an excellent, excellent site. Rosalind?

Resnick: I really like it too David. Clearly, the CNN site is pointing the way to the future, but for right now, it's still not ready for prime time. The fact is, you don't just need a 28.8 to see this thing, you need a 56K or a T1 to the desktop. If CNN wants to reach the same home users that it does today through TV, it's going to have to wait at least a year before bandwidth and access feeds catch up to a site like this. At the same time, I think it's encouraging to note that last year more computers were sold in this country than televisions. And I think it won't be long before we're all watching CNN through the Web.

Seybold: Wait a second, one correction. More dollars were spent buying computers for the home than were spent buying television. The televisions cost less.

Naturally CNN is going to put up videos because that's what CNN does. That defines the CNN site. I therefore find it essentially useless from a home standpoint, because like David, I'm not going to sit there and download video clips at the kinds of rates you have for modems in the home. The target customer for this, therefore, must be someone who's at work and has a high speed line. I wonder how many organizations really want their employees surfing CNN and downloading video clips at work.

Resnick: [Inaudible] ...were surfing the CNN site and some of the sites that they're surfing on the Web right now.

Seybold: Touche. I also think it's going to be a lot longer than a year before we have the kind of bandwidth in general use for the home that makes this sort of thing viable for home use. I'm still a little puzzled in terms of, I can see why they're doing it, and I can see that people who have access to high bandwidth play with it, but I have trouble seeing this as being a medium that reaches the same customers in their homes that CNN reaches in their homes with television.

Resnick: I'm not sure about that. First of all, once the new technologies come aboard to make faster access and greater bandwidth possible, it's no longer going to be necessary for people to download video clips the way David did right now. It's all going to be fed to our computer screens real-time. The interesting thing about the CNN site is you don't just watch CNN and get that video screen, you also have the text and the background. Once the bandwidth to support this becomes a reality, viewing and experiencing CNN on the computer is going to be a much richer experience than viewing it on TV.

Seybold: I think our disagreement basically is grounded in judgments of how long it will take to get that bandwidth.

Resnick: Let's hope it comes soon.

Seybold: You're probably more optimistic than I am.

On to the next critique

Back to main web critique page