AOL Conduct Beta Test on Movie Download

AOL has conducted the beta test on its videos download, according to the AOL web page. This beta test is expected to be expire until 2/2/2007. On the AOL Instruction page, AOL has recommended the users to use Internet Explorer when downloading the videos available on AOL. Temporarily, there are nine (9) movies available for download, as follow:
1. Eight Crazy Nights
2. Can’t Hardly Wait
3. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
4. D.E.B.S.
5. Easy Rider
6. Flatliners
7. Maid in Manhattan
8. Men in Black
9. Muppets Take Manhattan
However, I wonder when it is considered as a beta test, a tester need to enter the credit card number before he/she complete the download process. I believed this move will discourage the users in pursuing the beta test. I think privacy was of a great concern for most of the people out there. Though AOL can claimed itself a “business-only” organization, I strongly believe that they can create some more valuable resources on the web for the purpose of serving the web community.
On the AOL Video main page, they’ve been actively improving the video clips by adding several categories such as comedy, kids, news, sports, just to name a few, in order to cater to the different interest groups. They also offered the additional value-added service by introduce the best videos across the web. In other word, an user can find some other videos of Yahoo! Video, Google Video, YouTube Video, and etc. on AOL Video’s web page. This represent an important service that served as a collaboration strategy for AOL to work with the competitors.
My sense is that the biggest challenge AOL faced was the technological issues. I encountered the difficulty in accessing the videos. A message, i.e. Unexpected error occurred. (timezone) appeared on some of the movies on the main page. I believe that they’re not ready to challenge YouTube, or Google Video yet. I hope that AOL could learned from the negative feedback, if any from the audience on its AOL Video Blog and start improving from that.








