The Twilight Zone Now on CBS.com
I can’t remember where I found out about it now, but cbs.com has, in addition to their primetime shows, a few *classic *shows. Specifically, they have The Twilight Zone, Star Trek (Original Series), MacGyver, Hawaii Five-O, and (not a classic IMHO) Melrose Place.
The Twilight Zone in particular has been the cause of productivity drains. Supposedly every episode of Star Trek is there–and I did watch one or two of them–but not all the episodes of The Twilight Zone are there. The first three seasons are mostly there, but there are some missing episodes.
Like most of the other network sites, the shows have unskipable ads in them, but each “commercial break” is a single ad that is either 15 or 30 seconds. You can, of course, skip around within an episode, though you get an ad if you cross an ad boundary. Not unreasonable.
What’s particularly cool about The Twilight Zone is that you also get Rod Serling telling you what’s on next week’s episode and you get the public service announcement at the end. I don’t know why I think that’s cool, but I do.
The video player gives good quality on both my Mac and Windows boxes. It seems to not get along with Firefox if there are network connectivity issues. I end up having to do a shift-reload of the page to get the Flash video to play again. I didn’t try Internet Explorer, but Safari on the Mac fared much better.
All in all, not a bad viewing experience. I wish I could download and save for later, but I don’t see the network sites letting me do that.
