Random musings

This morning I read an interesting article from ProPakistani, regarding the “Legal Status of Websites that Host Pakistani Talk Shows and Other TV Progrmmes”. Now there are gazillions of website that are putting in the effort to convert the shows into digital media formats and offering them for download and even on-demand streaming. All of these ofcourse requires them to pay for the bandwidth, and clearly they are making enough to pay for this bandwidth.

So the question that ProPakistani (and others) raised was: How come no one from these TV channels taking a legal action against them?

Good question. There answer?

“Of course it’s illegal, we never allowed anyone copy our videos – they are doing so without rights”

Ah! So they do admit that these websites are taking content without their permission. Good, next step? They have no clue. How can they?!? Have you seen their current web presence?

Lets take a look at that. I am going to talk about the two major channels in Pakistan: Geo TV & ARY Digital.

ARY Digital:

I am not even sure where to start from. Lets look at it from a non-designer point-of-view first.

1. Who decided to use IFrames? Call him up and tell him that the world has moved on and then fire him.
2. Image swap on navigation menu? Are you kidding me? Seriously, I want to know.
3. What’s up with all the flying-and-dashing Flash content?

That’s my conservative list. I don’t want to bore my non-technical friends.

From the design perspective:

1. Some colors appeal to certain demographics, some are trendy, some have universal appeal, some are boring; others invoke no reaction. The color that ARY Digital picked for their website is just simply horrible and unpleasant.
2. The layout has no structure to it.
3. Links open in a new window (or they just open within the IFrame and I can’t bookmark them)
4. No social network integration. I am not even sure why am I saying this. I mean I didn’t really expect them to have that understanding anyways.
5. No clear way to see how the TV programs are categorized.

Oh this list can be long, but I will stop here.

Now let’s look at the other channel, Geo TV:

At least one thing that Geo did right was not to go with any weirdo color scheme.  But after that its all down hill.

Non design related issues:

1. No SEO optimization
2. Please give up on table based layouts
3. Hey, at least they are not using IFrames
4. Why do links to Geo ME, Geo Japan etc open in a new window?

Here are my biggest design issues:

1. No structure to the website.
2. What’s up with a small font-size?
3. Ads by Google? Are you serious? What happened to your sales team?
4. The navigation on the left has everything but what the user is looking for. Which shows are aired on Geo?

So with these kind of online presence how can they even think about taking any legal action against those sites. They have no way to provide that service to their customers, if it weren’t for these illegal streaming websites.

Solution?

Hire a design firm. Seriously, these guys have enough reason and responsibility to hire a design firm to work with them on their website to bring the content to the users. There is some really valuable and noteworthy content, but content without style goes unnoticed.

TV networks in Pakistan need to realize the potential that they are sitting on. Opportunity is with them to get the best solution out there so that their viewers can really enjoy their content. Its not hard, its very doable.

I would’ve provided my design thoughts on how these websites should look like but that is for another day. I would love to hear from someone at Geo and ARY on why is their site so badly designed. Its a long shot but hope never hurts.