I noticed on the train an ad for www.gyao.jp which is free on demand net TV. I guess the idea is that they can track what you watch and show you ads. The content is streamed but it's Windows Media Player 10 DRMed so I guess that makes it harder to copy. I'm not sure how much stuff they have but other than giving them an e−mail address and age they don't ask for any personal info like name, or address.

I watched an episode of Gatchaman, hi−res for streamed video. One annoying thing is they disabled all clicking on the window it shows in. It's using WMP and normally you can double click WMP to go fullscreen but in this case you can't which is pretty lame. A DRM artifact or just bad site design?

Speaking of video on the net I found out CNN's video is practically useless. Every time I clicked on a 1.5 to 3min news clip I had to sit through a 30 second commercial. Every 9−10mins of video that might be okay but every 1.5mins of video? Even worse though, it was always the EXACT SAME AD! I FRIKKEN SAW IT THE FIRST FIVE TIMES!! Showing the exact same ad over and over has got to kill viewer ship because it's so damn annoying and there's no way to skip it. Well, I'm sure they will eventually get it right.

Launch was a little better but still not perfect. If you just let it play videos it only shows an ad about every 3 videos, at least last time I watched it. But, if you clicked to watch a specific video it would always show an ad before that video. If it only did that ever 3−4 videos it might not be so annoying. Better, only after 9−10 mins of actual video streamage so that if you were looking for a clip you didn't have to sit through a 30−60second commercial just to see if what you clicked was what you were really looking for.

So far this Gyao.jp has commercials only every 8−10mins although when you start a stream there will be 2−4 commercials before it starts.