ABC.com & Six Degrees

Thanks to ABC’s fairly nifty
Website, I have been able to experiment with some non-iTunes
shows, namely Six Degrees. ABC has an archive of this show, so you
can go back and catch up. The player is awfully good, works
nicely within Safari, and has two sizes to pick from. (Neither is
full screen. Not unexpected given common home bandwidths.) And the
commercial content is so low-key and unobtrusive, that I have
actually considered buying a Mac mini and connecting it to my TV to
watch is this mode instead. (I have a gigabit Cat 6 cable from my
gigabit switch in the den to the living room where the TV is.)

We have a Comcast cable modem* that routinely delivers 7 to 8 Mbps, so
real-time watching and even jumping around within a show segment
is possible. When the short commercials come up, I just hit the
mute key on my keyboard and go back to writing. However, when the commercial is over, one must click on the continue button. This was done because ABC probably figured it was pointless to continue until your attention
is back on Safari.

I am impressed by the design of the ABC.com Website for TV shows,
and I’m also impressed by Six Degrees which is produced by Lost’s
and Alias’s J.J. Abrams. Six Degrees is not about anything really
important, but it is strangely compelling and entertaining. What’s
not to like about Bridget Moynihan, Hope Davis and Scott Campbell’s
assistant?

Now, we have to ask: will Safari 3.0 transmit to the Apple “iTV” the same way iTunes will?

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*In the old days we used to rail against the term “modem” in this
context. Now, I guess we just sigh and move on.