Live but broken in various ways
The Intel-backed Coolroom movies-download site did eventually go live around five yesterday afternoon, so we signed up and spent a merry few hours finding out what's really on offer.
The theory is, as you'll recall from this HEXUS.lifestyle.headline, Microsoft OnLine Spotlight - hardcore porn a few clicks away, that Coolroom will be providing in the UK downloads of the latest Hollywood movies in a format that let's you stream them to a network media player connected to a TV set - not just play them on the PC on which they were downloaded.
What also seemed to be the case was that the movies you download require you to own a PC based on Intel Viiv technology. But we cast strong doubt on that idea in yesterday's article and what we've learned while crawling over the site since then seems to confirm our viewpoint.
However, while that's to the good, our first impression of Coolroom, sadly, is that it might have been better to have delayed the launch.
The site is broken in various ways or, at very least, the design is flawed - even if you totally ignore the white-on-black look that, we thought, every half-experienced web designer knew was a no-no.
To gain full access, you need to sign up and that's where the problems start.
There clearly are rules about the password you need to choose but, stupidly, these are not spelt out anywhere we could see. The first password we tried was a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and 10-characters long.
This was rejected with a poorly-worded error message - "Passwords must contain numbers and letters" - that might have implied (wrongly, it turns out) that you need to use at least two numerals in the password.
After a few tries, we were able to get a password to be accepted but all along, the only help we'd been given was to be shown that same stupid error message.
The one that was accepted was seven-characters long, began with an uppercase letter, ended with a single numeral and had lower-case letters in between.
Just cos it got our goat, we later went through the registration process again and tried various combination that lead us to believe that the password must be no more than 10 characters long and contain at least one number.
But, we wonder, how many people are going to be put off from signing up just by the useless password-selection procedure?
You also aren't told which of the registration fields are mandatory. But it turns out that all are.
The designer cocked up with the phone number field, too. This says, "Mobile", offers you no option to enter a landline number instead (or as well) and says nothing about what the number might be used for.
We have no mobile reception on Orange in our east London offices - the current HEXUS-wide mobile provider - so left the field blank first time, only to be told to check the number we'd entered.
Realising that something had to go in there, we stuck in one of our landline numbers and, fortunately, that was accepted.
However, somewhere down the line, the backend system seems to have figured out that the number we used was not for a mobile phone because, when we went to look on the site at the details of our newly-created account, there was no number in the Mobile field.
Either that or the system just lost it or someone's decided that the number shouldn't be shown to the subscriber themselves!
When entering your date of birth, there are drop-downs for the day and month but the year has to be keyed in. Why?
Worse, you're not told whether to include the first two numbers of the year or if only the last two are needed.
There looked to be room for all four, so that was what we entered and, happily, it was accepted. When we did a second registration, we tried just entering the last two numerals and this resulted in an error message saying, "The year must be 4 digits".
It's necessary to enter credit-card or debit-card details to complete registration but here, too, the design is sloppy - with too little information provided about the different fields and an inconsistent layout in some places. However, though the start and end dates had drop-downs for the month but manual inputting of the year, the page did at least show what year format is acceptable - YYYY.
Shortly after we'd signed up, an email arrived confirming our registration and highlight something else the designer appears to have forgotten. The email included a reminder of the user-name we'd chosen and the password.
But the user-name field was blank because we hadn't been asked anywhere to choose a user name!
If the designer didn't forget to include a field for it in the sign-up form, then, perhaps, that field wasn't working and Coolroom made the decision to turn it off and press ahead with the site's launch even without registrants being able to choose user names.
That would be a dodgy decision in our view, given that the site appears to be aiming to have a measure of interaction between subscribers.
We've already commented about the site's black-and-white design (check it out below) but far more irritating than the hard-to-read colour scheme is the fact that there's a largish player window at top centre of the page that keeps on playing clips from the movies that Coolroom is trying to push or adverts that it's been paid by third parties to display. This is also shown below.
Black and white and VERY
irritating (click for larger image)
There are mute and volume buttons but these get undone without your permission.
Also, pressing the Stop button doesn't have the desired effect - it only makes the next video in the sequence start playing.
We thought for a moment that the Pause button does do the trick but videos started playing again when we navigated to other areas on the site or moved to a different tab in Internet Explorer 7 or changed to a different application and left IE running in the background.
We didn't want to turn off the sound at the speakers and got so badly hacked off with these nagging videos that there was a few times while we wrote this piece that we just closed the site to get away from that evil player.
Also frustrating was the way that we couldn't predict what would happen if we chose to use the keyboard's backspace to move backwards through the site. Sometimes it would take us to the previous page, other times it would take us to the page we'd been on before going to Coolroom.
But, all of the above might be regarded as small beer when you learn of Coolroom's prices. At first glance, these look highly inflated.
Newer titles such as Miami Vice and The Break-Up are £17.99 to download, yet you can buy the DVD versions for much less in a dozen and one places, including Amazon UK.
Older films are rather more affordable - at £7.99 per download - but, again, you can pay a good bit less for the DVDs on various sites. In between are other titles pitched at £13.99 and £15.99 and also available as DVDs more cheaply elsewhere
It could be argued that the ability to download is rather more convenient than buying a DVD online and then having to wait a day or so for delivery. But we can't think of many times when we'd be willing to pay a sizeable premium for that convenience, especially since we'd not be buying instant gratification. There's a delay while very large files come over, and that's going to be substantial even with an 8Mbit/sec or faster connection.
However, there's rather more to the pricing than meets the eye, as we'll explain on the next page.