Voddler will (and must) get better

I have used Voddler beta for a few weeks now and there are many things still missing before it is ready for a wider public.
For you who are not familiar with Voddler, it is a site for streaming movies. Most of them for free, financed by advertisement.

First of all,it is still a beta!

Let us start with a little comparison with Spotify. There is a fundamental difference between music and movies. Music can be listened to anytime anywhere and if you like music you will always find some tunes that fits your state of mind. Movies are completely opposite. They occupy your time completely. You must sit down and focus on the movie. You can not look at a movie while you are driving your car or doing your work. That makes the usage of Spotify quite different from Voddler.

What Voddler miss so far

The content: They have about 100 movies right now and that is of course more than I can use for a long time. Maybe there are 25 movies that I want to see.
I am not so worried as others about this. New movies are continously added and now they have an agreement with Sony and there will surely be enough movies for most of us to look at.

The Interface: Is a complete mess. It is adapted to be used with your remote control for the TV but hey we are using the PC now. Arrow up, down, left and right, Enter and Esc are the only possible keys to use.
They have copied the concept of the Video shop. With different shelfs for different genres and one shelf with new movies and so on.
You must look around with the Arrow keys until you find what you like. There is no search, no memory of what I have seen so far, no comment field and so on. Each movie have a rank that people can set after the movie. Why not use the IMDB site? A link would give all the information you need.
This interface must get better!
 
Social Networking: There is a complete lack of social networking from the voting of movies. No forum, no blog, no Twitter integration, no Facebook intergration etc. Yes, there is a homepage but it is not reached from the Voddler client.

As far as I can understand they have been focused on 2 problems. 1)  the technical challenge to distribute streamed full length movies to a huge amount of viewers. 2) The business challenge of negotiating with Disney, Sony and other big Dragons.
The interface and the social media aspect is not really covered yet. They probably don’t have the right skill within these very important areas. It is still not to late and I hope and believe that they will find out ways to make it better.

Because I like movies!

Posted via email from JP Fendrich’s posterous

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