fixplay.com.au; Oh dear. Basic user experience=nil.

At the movies the other night and treated with this pretty cheese-tasticly awful ad:

Yep, someone, somewhere, got paid for that. Anyway, lured by a glimmer of hope that someone had actually tried to do a hulu.com for Australia I headed over to www.fixplay.com.au Sadly I was disappointed immediately. Each and every programme is fairly old, but some good new-ish shows are there, so some kudos to them. I tried to watch and was greeted by, on every single video;

We're sorry, this video is not available at this time.

I changed browsers and tried again, same thing. Refreshed, nothing. Every single video, all=FAIL! At this point a massive amount of traffic would leave, wouldn't you? I nearly did, but then in frustration at this failure, I eventually noticed a small link way below underneath... 

Well that's clear then, eh?

What fixplay have disastrously done wrong, is not put the users experience of the site first. Kinda shocking really, but then most sites don't. And especially after paying for an ad, and the cost of cinema advertising. If me, and in charge? I'd be kicking some bum riiiight about now.

In a world where the flash player for video rules, and is cross platform, and where YouTube is king, Queen and the royal family of online video. Even with HTML 5 video steaming ahead, fixplay have bet badly on the bespoke browser plugin horse.The plugin at fault? Namely, Silverlight. Microsoft's waste of time and not very cross platform answer to the Adobe flash player. Then again fixplay has investment by Microsoft , who also have stakes in channel seven and nine who supply the content. Poor buggers have no choice but to try to flog the plugin.

(Silverlight is frankly, more crap you and your browser do not need.)

So ironically given it's called fixplay, and it doesn't play for many of us, someone does need to 'fix' it. Even updating the message to 'You need to install Silverlight' would be the lazy but more workable option. Although for many, too late, and I for one wont be back. So before you can make an ad and spend money and state your product is 'exciting' and 'change peoples life's', make sure a little ten minute basic user experience testing outside of the office or online with some geeks or beta testers gets done? Please?

It might not change your life, but will change your customers first basic expectations of your site.