Jananas

Sometime earlier this year Rogers redid their on demand services. Its been bugging me ever since and this morning I was finally motivated to take a picture of the screen that drives me jananas.

When I want to watch on demand, I punch in the channel number (e.g. 308 or 309). The following screen comes up.

I’ve already selected the channel I want to watch, so why do I have to press another button in order to get there? My guess is that loading the on demand channels takes up relatively more bandwidth, so they don’t want people who are channel surfing to waste that bandwidth/slow the system down when they flip past it. Understanding that, why are you making the experience of people who want to watch this channel more difficult?

Instead, why not implement a time delay on the channel? Five seconds would be enough so that people who are flipping past wouldn’t ‘load’ the channel (and use up bandwidth) and it would also mean that the rest of us who want to watch the channel don’t have to press another button to get to it.

Underlying all of this is that you want to make it easier for people to use your product, not make it more difficult. All they’ve accomplish for me is that everytime I try to watch things on demand I get frustrated and annoyed. When customers are annoyed just by receiving their basic services (i.e. those that they pay for), they are going to be a lot less accomodating and understanding when a real service or quality issue comes up.