• by Lydia Loizides , Op-Ed Contributor, May 31, 2006

Just call me Lydia "Traveling Gal" Loizides. As such, I rely on advanced media technologies more than the average Jane, if only to save my sanity. Web cams for saying good night to the family, Web-based enterprise solutions so that I can access work files and services as needed to make my traveling experience seamless, entertainment services to keep me from being bored ... Entertainment, you ask? Why not just watch broadcast TV? Why not just watch OnCommand? Well, season finales are basically over, and cable new seasons haven't started yet, and I missed a whole bunch of movies between September and May. But I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, entertainment services.

Now, I have changed the names of those involved to protect the innocent and avoid making this just about the guilty (although I seriously thought about pointing a finger at them, if only to make them blush) and to bring the moral of the story to the forefront rather than the company itself.

Anyway, the other night, having found nothing on the TV that was of any interest and too tired to go anywhere, I decided that I would download a movie to watch, legally, of course. After spending a few minutes weighing my viewing options, I decided on a short feature, only because I knew I wouldn't last longer than the hour and a half run time. Having not visited this site since purchasing my new laptop, I had to reinstall the proprietary software that was required as well as update the media player software.

And here is where the fun started. While the system recognized me as having a valid account, the process of accessing the content--remember, it was an hour-and-half run time--was a 57-minute adventure. It started with the firewall that the hotel used for broadband access, would not allow the site to validate that I was in the United States, followed by two false starts on downloading the management software, two reboots, initiating a chat session with customer service that only came to life three minutes before I solved the problem myself, interrupted by the Windows firewall service that refused to turn itself off despite another reboot, which finally led to the movie starting to download after yet another reboot. Somewhere in between all that entertainment, I turned into a trucker, with language that would have made Sam Kinison blush, threw a pillow, yelled at my husband via IM for not being able to fix it, and almost abandoned my efforts to watch the movie at least three times.

Moral of the story: after years of promising a user-friendly consumer experience, after begging and pleading and suing customers into doing the right thing, after listening to Oscar speeches peppered with anti-piracy messages--we are still far enough behind the consumer curve that we can barely see the backs of their heads. With all of the hype about mobile content, content anywhere and content that travels with you, it is a miracle we have not been laughed out of the market when it takes someone like myself, arguably tech-savvy, almost an hour to execute a task that should take the same amount of time it would take me to decide which program to watch. In case anyone didn't get the memo: it is 2006, folks--the age of the digital entertainment, the digital home, the digital consumer. My only word of business advice: don't make stealing it easier than buying it.