A critique on the changing face of video and MTV’s new website in order to discuss challenges facing rich media web designers
I recently wrote about the new video era. The basic idea was that because of limited bandwidth and lack of technological answers, Internet video has not been a threat to the stranglehold of broadcast TV. Users still want HD quality video and full digital surround sound when they are watching Grey’s Anatomy. Comcast is one company working hard to bring that quality level online so they can position themselves as a connectivity leader in the new IPTV era. They are already a broadband ISP, an Internet telecom, and on-demand content provider. And, while they do have an intelligent strategy for leveraging their huge broadband network infrastructure, I think they’ll lose their on-demand content services to online channels. That’s right, I said online channels, and not ABC, NBC, or CBS. The channel market is being shaken up by players like MusicPlusTV.com, who just landed their first round of financing to become one of the first breakout IPTV stations on the net; offering live programming and archives via podcasts. Traditional channels will have a lot to learn from those that already understand the online arena. At the same time Oldschool-but-savvy channels like MTV are not going to just sit their and let a new kid on the block take over their decades old reputation as the channel of cool. Right now, MTV doesn’t offer live programming on their website. Their site is more like an add on to their cable channels, which is not to say that their website is not good. In fact, the new MTV.com is a big part of why I’m writing about this post. They just redesigned their website, offering Flash and HTML versions.
Their Flash version does something pretty significant, it allows a user to switch viewing modes between site mode and video mode. Site mode displays content in a standard Mondrian grid. Clicking on the video mode changes the interface to look like YouTube for more convenient browsing. It’s one of the first times I felt like an all Flash site environment was the proper choice. Watching the video in the top left corner gracefully expand to take over the interface felt very easy for me to track as a user switching environments. It wasn’t about sex appeal or unnecessary glitz, it was a helpful use of animation to improve usability. If the viewing modes were to have been made as two HTML pages, they would have had to reload, which would have felt mildly disorienting to all users and confusing to less savvy ones.
So, is it possible to recreate the MTV.com viewing mode toggle with DHTML and AJAX? I would argue it’s quite possible. Here’s where I’m not clear. I’m not sure if Flash or DHTML is a better choice. I do know I have issues with the fact that you can’t highlight and copy text in Flash movies, you can’t bookmark pages within a Flash movie, they are invisible to search engines, and their client side resource hogs that don’t offer degraded options.
However.
I now believe I’m wrong about some of my judgments, and the others may be changing.
Apparently, you can copy and paste text in a Flash movie, but only if it is displayed in a textarea. You can bookmark and deep link to “pages” if you build your site right (click around nikestore.com and watch the URL as you navigate). I still haven’t seen a Flash site that produces friendly URLs, like HTML sites using the mod_rewrite function, but I assume that is only a matter of time. I’ve also recently been turned on to the fact that Adobe has opened the Flash source code to the Mozilla Foundation with the goal of integrating action scripting into the Firefox browser. Mozilla has been a long time supporter of web standards. I imagine they will apply their “accessibility through standards” discipline to Flash. Perhaps we’ll see truly search engine friendly Flash sites. Maybe we’ll see animation as a layer on top of well-formed content that can be toggled by the user on the browser level thereby eliminating the need for HTML versions. Maybe it will work something like the viewing modes on MTV.com.
If we can put Flash through a standardization process much like the one HTML went through with the advent of CSS, I could see it being a platform for the future. Helping entrench it’s appeal, Flash is the closest thing to a standardized platform in the mobile market. As Cameron Moll will tell you; if you think web designers have problems dealing with compatibilities between desktop web browsers, it’s nothing compared to the hundreds of players in the mobile market with even greater rendering discrepancies. It’s such a huge problem, that he’s writing a book about it. As a result, Flash is fast becoming the design platform of choice for mobile sites.
It makes me wonder how long we’ll be able to ask questions the pragmatic implications of developing an all Flash website. There is no doubt that HTML pages can not compete with the animation power of Flash. And as Flash continues to answer it’s critics with requested features, it looks like it will be taking a hard run at the old Vangaurd.
Check out what some of these top designers are writing about the state of web design:
- Khoi Vinh writes about his desire for better web design tools, especially for developing comps.
- Mike Rundle wonders will the Web 2.0 look will stand the test of time.
- Andy Clarke experiments with a new approach to web design using scraplets and introduces the concept for website dummy pages.
I’d like to learn more about other designers’ problems, processes, and predictions either via links or comments left below.
MTV.com is an entertainment site. In general most entertainment sites are more focused on delivering audio and visual experiences, so their priorities are a bit different than say, CNN.com. Flash is the easiest and most robust way of delivering this kind of content. Since it runs in it’s own environment (the plug-in), there’s no worries about cross-platform/cross-browser issues. It can even interact with databases and has scripting capabilities, only adding to the experience you can provide with it.
Good Flash developers will make URLs available for bookmarking particular parts of the Flash site as well. As for SEO problems, if you think about it, most large companies with huge branding and marketing campaigns use Flash for their sites, and they have virtually no needs for SEO, since they are already considered authorities on their particular industries.
Flash has it’s place, and it’s actually a very small niche, as you probably know…but also a very lucrative one. I don’t see Flash being replaced any time soon until there is an open source Flash-like system that is better, has better development tools, and has as good of adoption in browsers.
From Matt on December 3rd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
[...] It appears that since Adobe and Mozilla now have a common enemy, they are aligning to form a joint attack on the evil empire. I’m excited to see how it will all shake out. I also think this further accelerates the need for rich media development standards to alleviate the challenges facing modern web designers. I’d much rather see an open source team win than a corporation. [...]
From Cock blocking Microsoft at Metafluence on December 13th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Matt, I think you’re right about it not being soon. I don’t think it’s far off, though. In fact, I think it’s close enough that now is the time to position yourself if you want to be a leader when it’s widely adopted.
From Justin on December 14th, 2006 at 1:29 am
[...] I’ve recently been writing a few posts about the evolution of web design, particularly the impact of rich media, namely Flash, on modern web design. Other web design thinkers, such as Jeff Croft, have also been thinking about the new era of web design and the problems we need to address. [...]
From In search of a better way to design at Metafluence on January 13th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
“As for SEO problems, if you think about it, most large companies with huge branding and marketing campaigns use Flash for their sites, and they have virtually no needs for SEO, since they are already considered authorities on their particular industries.”
True.
People in the SEO world don’t understand that good and offline branding is the key for finding information online.
Even if you are #1 in Google for “shoes”, but you are a small boutique, people will still enter Nike.com to find their shoes, because at a branding level, you can’t compete with Nike.
But if you compete with the shoes boutique across the street and you are #1 for “shoes” in your area, thats another story and you are right. But only in this situation, not generally!
I say these, because most “SEO people” tend to inform people and their clients that if they rank better in Google than Nike.com or Amazon, they are better. And that’s a false promise!
As for the rich media design and video and all that, of course we will see a rise of these platforms. Flash is already king and can do most of the old stuff and much more.
MTV.com is not the best example though, generally speaking.
When Yahoo, Amazon or even Google will use Flash and rich media applications for their stuff, then we will see large improvements.
For now, these changes can be seen only in the entertainment markets, because these are the most pron to change.
Yeah, I would love to only design Flash websites, having free control on everything. That would be great. But Flash today is not ready to kick off old HTML and the “old ways” to build websites.
I will keep focus on Adobe Labs for now, because they will port us to the next level.
From Dragos on March 5th, 2007 at 4:13 am
I know this post is old but I’m going to address it anyway :)
“There is no doubt that HTML pages can not compete with the animation power of Flash.”
The advantage of flash is that they have taken the base ECMA scripting language and pushed it far beyond javascript - to support program packaging, classes(and subclassing, still not available in javascript without a shitty hack), and a fairly robust application compiler.
With css3(or even 2) and pioneering javascript libraries (aka prototype and scriptaculous, or even dojo(i hate dojo actually) or lesser known ones like moofx) you can absolutely animate with the power of flash.. The hard part is building a solid application (the right way) using dhtml. So while you can emulate flash with dhtml, the real beauty comes in marrying them together to utilize the best of both. Its relatively easy to build a actionscript/javascript bridge (that is what nikestore is doing to make the back button work.. an early ajax hack (hash mark) pushed to its limits IMO) the same way you would build a javascript/php program framework, using a matrix.
You and I have talked about hybridizing these technologies before and I know we are both on the same page. I just wanted to throw this out there. I’m so looking forward to being able to really hybridize, and push flash/dhtml/and server side languages cohesively. It gives me that giddy feeling that I had when I first discovered the internet and had my own geocities site 3 days later.
There’s my ramble for the day.. Peace
From josh on April 14th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Dragos, you say,
I’m not sure if it’s that they don’t understand it as much as they are so singularly focused that they try to solve everything with SEO. Nevertheless, you make a great point that it takes more than SEO to drive sales.
Josh, pretty much everything you said gave me a tent. I’m totally excited to cut you loose on some hybridization. I think the work we’re going to produce will help push developers to go deeper when making sites that have both a rich presentation layer and solid accessibility that degrades elegantly.
From Justin on April 17th, 2007 at 9:34 am