AMPed

So.

I gave it a few days for the servers to stop getting pounded over at Adobe Media Player.

Today I went back into Adobe Media Player to watch Star Trek: TOS, All Our Yesterdays.

And a nice lady told me (literally told me) "This content is currently unavailable.

Same thing for all CBS shows.

Go to play an episode of MTV Cribs:"PLAYBACK FAILED. This media file format is invalid or not supported by Adobe Media Player."

Universal Media Group (Music Videos)? Plays. Yay. But I could watch those in YouTube. In fact, most of the rest of the shows are just internet videos that can be found elsewhere online. It looks pretty, but I am so far not very impressed. Mostly because I was looking forward to watching all those Star Trek episodes....

And the interface? Pretty but unfunctional. Want to watch an episode? Click on it. If it doesn't play, go to the downloads screen and force the episode to resume. Wait for it to finish, and when it does, it disappears, like Kaiser Soze. It could just be the Canada thing, or it could be my flaky internet, but the whole experience has been less than outstanding.

I turned on Hotspot Shield to see if that would help. No luck. The things I could get to play (Universal Music Videos, Bikini Destinations) were choppy, and didn't have any sort of caching, and play back was horrible (not everyone has great internet connections), there is nothing to distinguish a 20 second preview clip from an actual show, so you have to click on something to wait for it to start to play before you can tell if it is a show or a preview.....

Tried watching Diggnation's Live in Amsterdam fiasco, but the video had to download fully before I could watch it (yay), but after waiting for ten minutes, I went and checked the downloads page, and it had stopped downloading.

Grr.

Colour me unimpressed by the whole experience. iTunes, for all it's flaws, is easy to use, intuitive, and pretty seamless. All AMP offered me was a choppy Feist video and 20 seconds of girls in bikinis.

Thanks, but no thanks. At least for now.