If there is one thing I hate about watching TV, it’s watching TV on the Internet. No bones about it, most major media outlets continue to get wrong what they can’t get right over the airwaves.

Commercials: bathroom breaks for some, pet peeve and bane to others. So why do larger media outlets think that their vision of video on the Internet is no different than that on the airwaves? This type of thinking will only lead to overall failure; failure to gain and retain viewers; failure to get marketshare; failure to provide anyone with any service that is worth spending time watching.

On the top of my pet peeve list is  those video sites that use Windows Media. Of course, I’m a Mac and Linux user so I can have some gripes with it. However To view video on the Mac, I need to download flip4mac which has its own “quirks” to say the least.

But back to advertising. I’ve gone to watch videos where the first 15 to 30 seconds of the video is an advertisement. Thanks for wasting my time and making me watch another dumb Microsoft commercial trying to sell me on the wonders of Word. A 30 second advertisement and a 2-3 minute video is a worse experience than watching live TV. Way to go… Way to leverage all the wonderful power that technology has given us by making the entire experience worse than what it was. Hopefully the post office won’t go back to using horse-drawn mail delivery.

Mass media execs have entirely missed the Internet boat. It sailed by them a long time ago. Is it really any wonder why people will spend a few hours watching videos on YouTube? Is it, aside from the dork factor of watching other people do stupid things, because the content is short, to the point, and generally entertaining without being draining?

I often wonder how many marketing execs would take a radio script and put the entire script up as print ad in a magazine or newspaper. It would generally be boring to see nothing but huge blocks of text and they would be mostly ignored. Good advertising is alluring within the media format it is designed for. Internet TV is not the same as “regular” TV (and I include cable), but that has not stopped marketing execs from applying one script to a different medium.

While I’m hardly one to pick on the business world and corporations, but for the bucks many of these institutions are paying for highly trained MBAs and/or consultants, very few of them have the wherewithal to think outside of the rectangular box (with a power cord).