When friends from different corners of my life recommend the same thing, I pay attention. Years ago, within days, an arch feminist, lesbian, liberal arts friend and an arch conservative, straight, financier friend independently recommended Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan science fiction series.
This I gotta see.
Bujold has been my favorite living SF writer ever since.
A similar thing happened over a handful of hours starting yesterday.
My friend John Durham and I usually talk about books, politics, the media industry, mutual friends and travel. In the 15 years I’ve known him, he has never said, “Did you see X on TV?” That changed yesterday when he recommended an hourlong Anderson Cooper 360 interview with Stephen Colbert.
Then, this morning, David, a friend since the 9thGrade, similarly praised the Cooper / Colbert interview on social media.
This I gotta see.
Let’s start with the important stuff: if you have any chance to see this interview, see it. It’s great. Cooper and Colbert have a wide-ranging, brainy, emotionally available, searching conversation about politics, faith, humor, personal resilience, and grief. Cooper visibly tears up at least once when talking about the recent death of his mother and what he learned from Colbert’s openly talking about the tragic death of his father and two brothers decades ago. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a Debbie Downer exercise. Both men are as disarmingly funny as they are honest.
Figuring out how to see the interview, however, was an emotional roller coaster ride.
This is a story of terrible User Experience (UX).
I’m still among the Americans who pay for Cable TV, Comcast’s Xfinity in my case, so I started searching there. No luck.
I browsed to the CNN On Demand offerings. Nothing there.
I found excerpts from CNN on YouTube, although not organized in any rational way. And I didn’t want excerpts, I wanted the whole interview.
Search on CNN’s website was laughably bad.
On social media, my friend David had mentioned that he thought the interview was available on Hulu. Since I want to see the new episodes of Veronica Mars on Hulu anyway, I activated a free month of the service… only to learn that in order to see the Cooper and Colbert interview I’d also have to subscribe to Hulu’s Live TV offering. Nope.
It was unclear to me which episode of Anderson Cooper 360 contained the interview, so I found the August 14th episode available on demand from Xfinity and put it on. The interview was teased for that episode. There was no fast forward option, so 52 interminable minutes later I learned that only five minutes of the interview would be shown… the rest would be shown the next night on a special episode of the show. Arrgh!
“Surely,” I thought, “they’ll replay such a high-profile piece.”
I went to the Xfinity programming guide, navigated to CNN, navigated to where I could shift the guide to display everything that was coming on CNN over the next two weeks, and started scrolling. A minute later I saw that the interview would be replayed on Sunday at 5pm Pacific. (Make note, folks who haven’t seen it yet.) Ah ha! Good news.
Then, when I clicked to open that listing to record it on Sunday, I saw a little “play now” button.
The interview was hiding there all along, in plain site, like something out of a Poe short story.
I watched it. It was wonderful. See the first part of this post.
But why did this terrible user experience happen?
I can’t explain why searchability on CNN.com is terrible. It makes no sense.
I can’t explain why my paying for CNN on Xfinity doesn’t allow me to watch it on Hulu.
YouTube’s disorganization makes sense: it is driven by algorithms, not people.
As for Xfinity, when I searched for Anderson Cooper 360 I saw episodes for 8/14 and 8/16, but not for 8/15. This seemed odd at the time, but what is available at any given moment on Xfinity is always a bit mysterious.
After I manually clicked until I found the on-demand version, I saw that it was classified as AC360 rather than Anderson Cooper 360, and there was no referral from one to the other. This was, then a data-entry, database misadventure. Somebody, presumably at CNN, was thoughtless as he or she categorized the interview. It’s understandable.
But it is no excuse!
CNN is now part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia which includes all the former Turner channels, HBO, Warner Bros., Sports Illustrated, and much more. WarnerMedia has a ton of programming across many channels.
In a world of infinite content abundance, discoverability and accessibility are the mostimportant things for any piece of programming. It’s better to have a crappy show that is easily discovered and seen than the best program ever that is hidden.
If it weren’t for my intense, morbid curiosity about how hard I’d have to work to find that interview, I probably would never have seen it.
WarnerMedia cannot count on morbid curiosity as part of its business model if it wants to succeed.
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