I don’t do it too often, but when I do miss recording a show on my TiVo for whatever reason, I turn to online video streaming and have had pleasant experiences with both Hulu and ABC.com. Just recently, I caught up with some episodes of Brothers & Sisters at the ABC video site without a hitch, both with a PC and a Mac. So, last week, my mom was in town and she’s a big Dancing with the Stars fan, so I recorded that instead of How I Met Your Mother. I knew HIMYM was available for streaming at the CBS site, so I didn’t think it would be a problem. Until last night, when because of all the times the video froze or restarted, I spent more time watching commercials online than I did of the HIMYM episode. The longest stretch I ever had was about 5 minutes before the video would freeze, and if I tried to restart the video, I would have to sit through another commercial first, of course. It was an extremely frustrating experience, and I never did get past the first commercial break of the show. If anyone is relying on the CBS site to catch up on some of the CBS shows, don’t. I tried both a PC and a Mac with various browsers and none of them worked for me. The CBS streaming video site gets a failing grade from me.
May 6, 2008 at 9:40 am |
I’m having a similar problem… it seems to change functionality day to day and chooses whether to work in IE or Firefox. Today I could get neither to work.
May 7, 2008 at 2:42 pm |
CBS also uses Joost – but the quality there isn’t spectacular either.
May 9, 2008 at 9:17 am |
Interesting I noticed this same problem in the last week or so. I used to watch a few shows on there and the streaming quality is now super lousy. I thought the problem was at my end, now I know others are having it.
July 12, 2009 at 4:19 am |
I HATE the cbs streaming video section. I’ve been trying to watch the original star trek series for months now but it almost always takes DAYS to watch just a single episode. The videos always freeze, or ads come up that say they will go away in 30 seconds but stay for 3 HOURS. But the worst thing is they purposely lower the volume on all the content severely so you have to turn your speakers to max volume. Then all of a sudden a viagra ad comes on thats so loud I get cited by the police and have them tell me I need to turn the volume down! F&$* You CBS!!!!
July 13, 2009 at 9:07 pm |
CBS is making some changes to their video player… to be released soon. some of the ads blast, but most of the time its fine.