If you have been here a while, you know that I very consciously steer visitors away from stations with streams that take a long time to load. “How Long” depends a lot on the type of Internet connection you have. I’m on a midrange DSL connection (I live too far from downtown to get really fast DSL) – at 968 kb/sec, if the connection is running at full speed, that means it maybe can get 100,000 characters/bytes per second. That’s still 20x faster than dialup.
But the people writing the streaming players – Clear Channel and Liquidcompass in particular – seem to think everyone using their player is on a local area network in their computer room running at 100 Mb second. Even without a video ad, it can take 30 to 60 seconds for a player to load.
So I’m looking at maybe making this a more scientific metric. For your amusement, here is what it looks like when Clear Channel player loads (there is no video ad here because this was my third load of the same station)
(Click to see a full size image)
In the middle of this sequence of 27 exchanges downloading 678k of data taking 19 seconds, the one with the big red bar is a serious design mistake. For whatever reasons, it is downloading an XML file that contains all the data for every clear channel radio station
You can download and look at it outside the browser.
That download is 488k of the total and added 9 seconds to the load time. Even if for some reason that was necessary, it could be loaded after the stream has started playing in the background…
Next Monday, if all goes well (how likely is that?), I should have a 12 Mb/sec uVerse connection. I surrendered to the bloat (more accurately, it’s annoying that I can’t even play youtube videos without it stuttering)
I’m thinking about using this tool (or similar ones I’m looking at) to show you just how much “stuff” is being sent to people tracking everything you do (google, facebook, advertiser networks) if I get any encouragement at all…
Serious design mistake? I’d call it a dunderheaded flub of substantial proportion. What in heaven’s name is all of the XML going to accomplish (besides delaying the load)?
If HTTP Analyzer is free and the tool of choice, I would be happy to help with the work!
Firebug is even better (see later post). HTTP Analyzer is not free – it’s like $140 for non-commercial use.
A small amount of why it is doing that (maybe) could be related to my settings. I don’t let Internet Explorer cache web pages. It’s possible if I told it to use temporary internet files and visited more than one Clear Channel station, it might not retrieve it again – but I doubt that….. the XML is not coming from a generic clear channel web server, so the browser cache won’t see it as being the same file.
Hence, one of the reasons that I will hunt for an MP3 or WMP stream and use my own player.