Studious > Sexy
Let’s just get the cat out of the bag: Windows Media Player (WMP) is old school. It’s a grandfathered media player that needs to be phased out or revamped. And, it’s definitely not sexy.
Sexy aside, everything has a purpose–and WMP gets the job done. It doesn’t use as much bandwidth as Quicktime, because most websites that need to stream at high quality do not rely on WMP. Forbes.com doesn’t seem to mind Windows Media Player’s simplistic nature, because it gets the job done. News, compared to websites that use plenty of rich media graphics, does not need much bandwidth to stream their content. In the news industry, speed trumps quality to help break the news–but not to say quality is completely neglected.
News sites like Forbes.com opt to use Windows Media Player because their main focus is not to deliver a rich media experience. Most of their content is ‘live’ coverage, or ‘on site’ coverage–both of which do not provide a seamless experience anyway. Their purpose is the get the news out faster than the competition. With news stream at high speed and low quality, it is cost effective solution for streaming media on news websites.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of WMP, because I like to watch videos online for the rich media experience. When I visit news sites, I read the articles 99% of the time, because I can skim and only read the sections I want. I feel that watching videos on news sites are time suckers, because you waste a lot of your time suffering through bad advertisements and news reporters anyway.
[After taking a streaming media class], I will stand up for WMP because quality doesn’t always have to have sex appeal. If you’re in the video industry, it doesn’t hurt to know both technologies.
