1. There are over 500 channels listed, and I only have access to around 50. This is fine in itself, but there is no way to determine if I have access until I try to view the channel. There is no option to filter out the channels that are inaccessable
2. There is no way to search through the shows except manually. Scrolling through pages upon pages of listings just to find one thing to watch is extremely tedious, especially when trying to relax.
3. Once I finally found a show, I had to watch it from somewhere in the middle. Why is it starting halfway through? Wait, I need an additional, expensive piece of equipment to fix this? Bad business. Sell a broken product, and then sell another product which fixes the original flaws.
4. Commercials are far too long, I have to watch about 5 minutes of commercials for each 20 minutes of show. There is something wrong with this.
5. Overpriced. I'm paying ~$25 / month for this service with all these failings and I still have to watch commercials.

How can such a service compete with the likes of Hulu, youtube, megavideo and sidereel? I suppose it will die off as soon as people realize how broken it is.

They've also done a few other small videos just to keep people watching. Here's the pilot (part 1, part 2, part 3), a Mentos and Coke skit, 'Til Death' (abridged), and a bit from the Emmys.

As I mentioned above, the effect this show has had is also quite interesting. It shows (yet again) that the internet can be harnessed in ways that has not occured to the industry. Distributing Pilots for show over the internet so that the audience can actually say what it likes, as opposed to showing whatever the studios think we want to see.

Goodluck Nobodys Watching, can't wait to see more of your stuff.

[youtube]fqMu6e5Dgtg[/youtube]

The record industry was terrible about this during the Napster era, and has only in the last few years started to really embrace this new technology. The movie studio's are now attacking Google Video and YouTube. Warner aside, these people don't see the benefit of these sites. For almost any sort of market, exposure only increases your sales. This has been proven quite adequately with mp3s, and I can't imagine it not applying just the same with video.

Lately people have been ridiculing and litigating Google for everything they are doing, because they are making money. They are well within fair-use laws. Their news site only shows a short clip from the author's site which the reader must go to in order to read the full article. The book search that they have created works similarly, a small excerpt is shown with a reference to the full work, this is the same rights that someone writing a paper would get, why is it not applicable to Google? Because they are displaying ads? They are not SELLING the book, nor the excerpt. Why should they have to share their ad revenue?

People complain that their copyrights to their content are being infringed, when in reality they should be thanking Google for the added exposure. They should try to harness this new exposure and maximize their profits from it. Litigating new technology only stifles innovation. Google is giving consumers exactly what they want, an easier way to find and absorb content. If the content providers/producers were making this as easy as Google is, then THEY would be making the money and even still they are only GAINING from Google's distribution of their content because it always points back to the source.

This really comes down to people being angry about not getting money. Even if the money being made is not directly coming from their content, but only indirectly associated with it. As I understand it, Google has an opt out mechanism for excluding content from their search products. If these people don't want their content -- which is FREELY viewable -- to be redistributed then they can simply exclude themselves, but that is not what they want. They WANT to be included, but the want a share of the revenue to which they have no right. Shameful, simply shameful.

[youtube]XPWS1qtUlZM[/youtube]

It seems I'm not the only one that thinks Google's time could be better spent.  Some people at Festoon have released a plugin for gTalk that adds support for video chat.   And I've heard from over at Reseize.com that there is a company making a VOIP plugin called Talqer that allows you to make outgoing and incoming calls similar to Skype's and Yahoo's services, albiet at a cheaper rate.

UPDATE:  After playing with Democracy Player a bit I've found it does not manage torrents very well.  It is best to download torrents with something like utorrent (which will handle rss feeds nicely) and then watch them from some other program.  DP still provides access to tons of other quality content though.