A friend of mine had missed her episode of America’s Next Top Model and she had me dig it up online, I thought I was doing her a service. Little did I know. I don’t know where to begin.
The episode recap was the tiny computer screen version. It was about the size you first see on Hulu before you expand the video screen to have a nice large version to watch. You can’t do that with this video episode on The CW. In fact, looking around at other shows, you can’t expand them to full-screen either without horrible degradation of the image.
When she watched the episode, I noticed in the background a choppiness where the episode had moments of silence. But it wasn’t the episode. It was the feed, dropping or chopping up the feed / sound of the episode. It looked like an old dubbed Godzilla movie where the words we were hearing weren’t matched up to the mouth motions!
In quick review: Choppy image, choppy transmission, forced to watch it in tiny version. Sounds pretty bad so far.
But wait, here’s the topper.
The 1 hour and 2 minute episode had 7 commercial breaks. 7 uninterpretable, unstoppable commercials. Each commercial break lasted a few minutes with a few ads. And just like television, they were loud. The first ad was just a touch louder than the show. The 2nd and 3rd ads in each segment, were louder. MUCH LOUDER.
How much louder? I was in the other room and could barely hear the episode. The ad came out 2, maybe 3x louder. I could clearly hear it in the other room, in fact, it sounded loud in the other room.
I’m so surprised that a network with such hits as Supernatural, Smallville, The Vampire Diaries and other shows that keep them afloat, actually doesn’t have a decent infrastructure to support their own shows for time-shifted viewing like the other networks do.
My suggestion is if you watch anything on The CW and you can’t catch it live, RECORD IT!
If at all possible, I will never head to The CW to watch anything ever again. I get enough commercials on my television. This makes the 2 or 3 small interruptions on Hulu look fantastic. In fact this makes the commercial breaks on the tele even seem like a great idea.
Now ya know!
