IE-Only Marketers Are Stupid
"PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use MTV Overdrive," so says MTV's Broadband Video Channel site. Excuse us, MTV, but no, we don't. Perhaps you haven't heard that Firefox isn't just this little side project that a bunch of geeks work on in their spare time in-between discussing episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It's a full fledged, far superior to Internet Explorer, browser that's gaining some serious market share. Marketers who continue to practice this loyal-to-Microsoft buffoonery are unsmart, unintelligent and losing out on a vast chunk of business.
Comments
wonder if this has anything to do with the deal for Urge or if it just a result of lazy developers
Aren't there stats somewhere that show that Firefox users are more net savvy, more likely to buy things on the net, and earn more money?
I agree with the first poster - call it conspiracy theory, but you have to wonder if it has something to do with all the dealings Microsoft has had with MTV of late.
Or maybe MTV's developers are just hacks (not hackers) and can't do simple embedded media across platforms.
You forgot to mention that Overdrive doesn't work at all on Macs.
i was a developer on overdrive for a few months. i forget the details exactly (it was a while ago), but there was something to do with the activex plugin and the windows media plugin not working correctly in firefox/mozilla. there were a few developers over there that were attempting to make a version that works in firefox/win. no hope for mac because the MS has not released a version of WMP for mac that supports their DRM.
mtv entered into a deal a couple years ago with Microsoft that essentially killed them using anything except windows media for video files and no functionality was created for it to run on macs or anything except IE.
My guess is that whatever money microsoft is dumping into the company is off-setting whatever they think they might be losing in ad revenue for the firefox/mozilla/safari/mac crowd.
I get microsoft's play there as it gets people to keep using IE who otherwise wouldn't anymore. The smarter move, though, might be to actually produce better product.
I don't hate the windows experience but, hell, IE is wack no matter how you slice it.
MTV is wack...
Maybe the MTV guys actually took a look at their web stats and figured out that it wasn't worth the effort to please such a small percentage of their users.
How many of you actually still watch MTV anyway?
Stop whinning and grow up.
I am quite suprised that MTV as hip as they use to be - is making this huge oversight - sure IE is probably on more computers than any other - but missing out on huge amount of poeple using firefox is a bug mistake in my book. I have IE on my computer, but I always surf with firefox - if a site does not work with firefox, I just skip it... I'm sure they will get a lot of flack for the probablems with firefox, since a majority of the MTV demographic I bet is hipper, and therefor more apt to be using firefox, as opposed to say the demo that is just surfing the news sites..
People who use Macs won't bother seeing anything from MTV anyways.
activex plugin and the windows media plugin...
As far as I can tell, Overdrive's front end is built with Flash. I would assume they would use .flv as their video format... quality is good and bandwith is less.
I've only recently started using Firefox but since that day, no way I'm going back to using IE. Actually, I only use it now to check out everything looks fine, layout-wise, in my websites, for those unfortunate who haven't turned to the age of browser-reason. Yet!