B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

I posted last month about the upcoming arrival of our DIRECTV HD DVR. After a month of using this very heavily (between my wife and I, we watch/record about 20 total shows on a weekly basis), we have finally determined that this falls well short of our expectations and we are very disappointed in the product. Let’s review:

We’re previous Tivo customers
Our main DIRECTV receiver was a DIRECTV/TIVO combo receiver which allowed recording of 2 live programs simultaneously and the ability to watch a 3rd program that was already recorded. We also have a single, standard receiver for a guest bedroom. We’ve been DIRECTV customers for nearly 5 years now, having moved service with us from MN to NC as well.

DIRECTV HD DVR: The Good

1. Unlike the old Tivo Series 1 DIRECTV/TIVO DVR, the DIRECTV HD DVR is very fast at setting up recorded shows via the guide. Tivo Series 1 would force you through a couple of menus before you would have successfully set up a show for recording.
2. Setting up a season pass is just as easy: click record twice. You’re done. Tivo was a longer, more drawn out process, and I really like the DIRECTV HD DVR’S way of simplifying and making some assumptions for you (i.e. keep 5 most recent, delete as needed, etc.). You can always override the settings, but from our standpoint, we typically watch the recorded show within a week of it airing, so the defaults are good. Rarely do we record something and have it fall off the list without having viewed it.

DIRECTV HD DVR: The Bad

1. The system is too slow for the fast-forwarding speeds. On this system, there are 4 fast-forward speeds: 1, 2, 3, and 4. Unlike Tivo, the DIRECTV HD DVR does not have a skip button for jumping ahead in 15-minute increments.
• So, they have a speed of “4″ for fast-forwarding. This speed is too fast for any human to be able to react quickly to the choppy on-screen playback when fast-forwarding between commercials, so you’re guaranteed to overshoot the commercial break and end up several minutes into your program. So, we reserve speed 4 for jump far ahead in a recorded show.
• Speed 3 is typically where we fast forward. The problem again is that the play back is so choppy that we frequently overshoot the commercial break by several seconds. The timeline bar at the bottom doesn’t even update in real-time with the fast forward…it too is very choppy. It’s really difficult to easily fast forward on this system.
• Speed 2 is too slow for fast forward, but not fast enough…it’s what we use if we undershoot the commercial break.
• Speed 1 is very slow, but again, the screen is choppy enough to still overshoot your desired start point in the recorded show.
2. There is no obvious way to toggle between both live signals. On our previous Tivo Series 1 DIRECTV receiver, we could hit “Live TV” and toggle back and forth between live signals. Not with the DIRECTV HD DVR. This is a bummer for us football fans who have SuperFan on one channel and our favorite NFL Sunday Ticket game on another channel.
3. After finishing watching a recorded show, the DVR will drop you off right in the middle of any actively recorded show. This was a huge oversight. We watch several shows that are back-to-back. We’ll start watching one show about a half hour into it, finish it up, and then as soon as you hit the “stop” button, the user interface of the DVR shows you a live feed of what’s being recorded. This is frustrating when you don’t want to see any spoilers in the show you’re recording. This happens on a daily basis and seems to be a design oversight. Some real-life usability testing should have flushed this oversight out, but apparently not.
4. Out-of-sync video and audio playback. This has happened occasionally on our system, usually for a minute or two and then it “fixes itself.” Tonight, however, my wife swore the world was going to end because Grey’s Anatomy was entirely out of sync the entire show. We’re not talking a 1/2-second sync error, we’re talking the video appeared to be playing at a much faster rate than the audio. The audio track wasn’t even close to being in sync with the video. After several stops, starts, fast-forwards, rewinds, we gave up. We’ll watch this episode on iTunes, thankyouverymuch.
5. Lack of integrated features like Internet scheduling. Tivo Series 2 was headed in the right direction with the ability to schedule shows to record online, the ability to access Internet applications, etc.
6. Once a show is deleted, it’s gone. The concept of the trash can or recycle bin from a computer should be available on all systems where media is constantly viewed and removed. Occasionally, we accidentally delete shows on our DVR and want to retrieve them. Tivo Series 2 added this functionality in mid-2006, and we loved it.

There are several oversights with this product…it’s getting so frustrating (we still have our old Tivo Series 1 and it’s much nicer in terms of its intuitive menus and fast forwarding) that I’d seriously consider dropping DIRECTV in favor of HD Cable with a Tivo Series 3. I really wish DIRECTV had stuck with Tivo on this HD DVR. The Tivo experience is much more pleasant…the DIRECTV experience feels like a cheap knock-off. Certainly not as bad as Time Warner’s DVR, but also not in the same league as a Tivo…which is unfortunate.

A good lesson in product development and delivering a product consumers want. I feel this one has really missed the mark…it’s one thing to have an HD DVR, but I’ve invested a lot of money in our HD system, the last thing I wanted was a sub-standard DVR because it’s something we use every day. We’ll switch to HD cable by the end of 2007 if the DIRECTV HD DVR isn’t improved based on our complaints listed above.

In regards to yesterday’s post, Tribal Fusion did respond to my e-mail inquiry with the following:

I appreciate your willingness to work with us in maintaining our standard of quality content. To answer your question on how we could potentially work together on user-generated-content, there are two possibilities:

1. All content would be reviewed by staff before it is published live on the site.
2. As you mentioned, YouTube does allow users to flag content as “inappropriate”, and then reviews all flagged content. However, they also mark all uploaded content as inappropriate until it has received a certain number of views. If, in that time, no user flags the image, it is marked as safe. If a user does flag the content, it is pulled and reviewed.

This is good news for us and also a good indicator that they are willing to work with social media sites. We’re working towards a “flag as inappropriate” feature a la YouTube for our user-generated content. More on this as we continue to work with Tribal Fusion. For now, we’re on the right path towards getting back on their network.

At the risk of poo-pooing any chance at rekindling our relationship with Tribal Fusion, we (SuperMotors) were taken back by an e-mail we received from our (new) account executive on Friday morning, February 16th and 3:23 AM. In what appears to have been a standard form letter used to contact sites that have “fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network,” we were notified that adult content was found on SuperMotors.net and that this was in fact a violation of the Tribal Fusion Terms of Service. This as the first such notification in our almost 5-month relationship with Tribal Fusionnnn.

Fair enough. They have every right to be monitoring the quality of their websites and I applaud them for enforcing this. This is what we received:

Hello Eric,

I am contacting you because it is our belief that the quality of the content on SuperMotors has fallen below the standards of the Tribal Fusion ad network. In particular, the content found on these pages:

(page link removed)

Content like this is a violation of our publisher contract; and as a result SuperMotors has been removed from the Tribal Fusion Marketplace and we are currently serving only defaults or PSAs. We value the relationship we have had with you up to this point, and if you would like to speak with us regarding ways to potentially continue working together, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, I have to ask you to please remove Tribal Fusion’s ad code from the SuperMotors website and/or from your adserving system by the end of the week. Failure to do so will result in broken images appearing through our ad tags.The clause in our publisher contract for termination (for your reference):

6.2 Termination. Publisher may discontinue participating in the marketplace after the initial term by providing 30 days written notice to Tribal Fusion™. However, Publisher has an obligation to fulfill any advertising campaign configured to run on their site in its entirety prior to termination. Tribal Fusion™ may terminate a Publisher’s participation at any time if Publisher’s website quality falls below the standard set by other websites in the marketplace, fails to deliver the minimum number of impressions, or if Publisher fails to comply with any other provision of these Terms and Conditions.

2.2 Right to Refuse. Tribal Fusion™ reserves the right to refuse to accept any publisher at its sole discretion, as a member of the Tribal Fusion™ Marketplace. Publisher websites shall not contain (or have direct links to) any content deemed inappropriate by Tribal Fusion™ at its sole discretion, which includes but is not limited to the following: content promoting the use of alcohol, tobacco or illegal substances; sex, pornography or adult-oriented content; violence, expletives or inappropriate language; content promoting illegal activity such as copyright infringement, racism, hate, mail fraud, spam, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other advice not permitted under applicable law; content that is libelous, defamatory, contrary to public policy or otherwise unlawful.
Should you have any questions regarding this issue, feel free to contact me

Since adult content is also a violation of our own Terms of Service, we immediately removed the material referenced in the link they provided us (which had been available online for less than 24 hours), issued the offending user a “strike 1″ (we utilize a “3 strikes and you’re out” policy for our users) via e-mail, and responded to Tribal Fusion informing them the matter had been resolved. My follow-up e-mail:

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention. We have removed this photo as well as another photo from this user’s account that were in violation of our terms of service as well as Tribal Fusion’s. We take issues like this very seriously and have sent the user a warning about posting future content like this.

SuperMotors.net is a site with user-generated content. Due to the volume of newly posted photos every day, it is impossible for us to monitor each and every photo, sound, and video for quality. For this reason, we rely on our members to help us police other user-generated content (pictures, sounds, videos, comments, forum posts, blog entries, etc.). We have a clause in our terms of service which specifically states that adult content is not allowed to be posted and if it is, it will be deleted and a warning will be issued to the user. If the user is found to violate this rule a second time, their account is temporarily suspended. A third time results in permanent account deletion, along with all of their posted content.

The image at the URL below was posted on 2/15/07, less than 24 hours ago. I hope that we can be reinstated and continue to be a part of the Tribal Fusion ad network as we have now resolved this issue as soon as we were made aware of it.

To our surprise, there is no leniency. My intent on this follow-up e-mail was more to issue a formal apology and to state that, “Yes, hosting adult photos is not how we do business, nor is it something we permit.” The response from Tribal Fusion:

Unfortunately we cannot have our ads running on unmonitored user-generated content. We have looked at your site more closely and have found numerous pages with this type of content. Because of this, we will be forced to deactivate your account. I have decategorized your site so you should now be showing either PSAs or the defaults you have set up in our system. Later today, I will have to deactivate your account completely. At that time you will serve error messages.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

So, in a span of just 12 hours, this revenue source has completely gone away. While Tribal Fusion isn’t our primary source of income, we are diversified enough among our own sponsorship dollars, subscribers, and Google AdSense, it still is an unplanned loss of revenue especially entering a weekend on a record-setting month for us. Revenue is still revenue, and we really take this seriously. Finding another ad network is not only time-consuming, but really painful when a company like Tribal Fusion is regarded as one of the best in the industry. How and why would we want to switch in the first place?

I did some further digging and looked other sites in the Tribal Fusion Automotive Channel. One of them is YouTube.com. I proceeded to reply to the message above explaining that even YouTube.com, backed by Google, is unable to deal with the overwhelming demand of user-generated content. They do their best by implementing a “report as inappropriate” link on every posted video to allow the community to help report offensive content. We’ve all seen the headlines that YouTube has droves and droves of copyrighted material. There currently isn’t a magic formula to policing user-generated content other than providing the necessary tools for the community to report inappropriate content and to deal with it in a timely manner (if you or your staff don’t discover it on your own).
Another site, which shall remain nameless, has one of the racy Tribal Fusion Ad Network Ads for True.com dating service running on a page where there is a link to view illegal street racing videos as seen in this screen shot:

It just seems that we are being held to unreasonable standards when other sites on the Tribal Fusion Automotive Network are obviously violating the Terms of Service. We fixed the problem on our end in a timely manner and are more than willing to work towards a better solution that will keep Tribal Fusion happy and more importantly, their clients (advertisers) happy.

I’ve asked Tribal Fusion how we can strive to meet their standards for providing sufficient moderation for on a user-generated content site. Unfortunately, our account exec is unreachable for the next two weeks, so I will be attempting to get a hold of another account exec this week to see if we can’t come to an agreement. It really seems like this is a misunderstanding. Maybe my e-mail was interpreted as “we don’t moderate our user-generated content?” Regardless, we can modify our moderating policies and procedures to meet Tribal Fusions needs. I just hope they are open to making this consideration.