I’m about at my limit on the crap Cumulus is doing. I may just drop everything except the URL for the web sites.
Some of you have noticed (perhaps) that Cumulus has dropped their streaming links for iHeartradio from their web sites. I’m not clear on when on why that happened. One visitor wrote to me because the iHeartRadio player pushed a beer ad to him at work, which is an employment no no.
So I started going through and fixing up the players (Cumulus has over 200 stations).
First it informed me that Internet Explorer is not a supported browser – please update to a “modern” browser. Okay, I have Firefox and Chrome installed.
Then I’m hit with this crap which I’ve started getting recently on a somewhat random basis:
Another station presented me with a youtube video that I had to watch in order to hear the stream. It offered that the video would go away after 8 seconds, but it didn’t and there was no way to close the window.
This company is seriously delusional if it thinks it is guarding Fort Knox from the people who want to listen.
Classic – “seriously delusional”. If successful business was easy, everyone would do it. Internet Explorer may not even be a browser – based on my experience with IE 11.
Pushing ads of any kind are annoying to me, as are the mandatory vids that popup and can not be closed. The “seriously delusional” description is spot on! Do what you gotta do.
iHeart always tells me my IE is outdated but it plays anyway.
For now.
The people steering the web have deviated far from the original concept, being driven by commercial interests and maybe their own egos – and frankly by the bulk of the people using the web now.
The original idea behind HTML was the web server describes the content, but not the format. The server shouldn’t assume anything about the capabilities of the browser or device viewing the page. It may have a small screen, it could be a blind person, the connection might be slow or expensive.
Instead, now we have web designers who think they are doing phototypesetting controlling every single pixel. Flash doesn’t convey information to blind people or search engines (not to mention the security issues). Everybody has their hooks into tracking everything you’re doing.
The bloat is becoming incredible. I’m on a 25 mb/sec connection and it can take 30 seconds for some web pages to load. A large portion of them crash my 1st generation iPad by making it run out of memory viewing a single page. They often do things now like preload video clips just in case you click on them or sometimes they autoplay videos.
My web site is “so 1990s” and that’s on purpose. 😉
THANK YOU!!!
I tend to shun glitz, glamour, and hucksterism, and I find none of those attributes here. Again, Thank You!