Is the Mariners website as bad as the team?

Well I feel like I’m about to beat a dead horse here, but being a Mariner fan I thought I’d check out the official team web page and see how it compared to the highlight videos on ESPN.com.  For starters, the ESPN homepage on arrival starts playing a preselected highlight clip of whatever they figure the top story/game is.  I assume they’ve data mined me in the past to figure out what clip to show me.  The Flash video looks clear, the movement is smooth and sounds pretty decent though the video window I’m guessing is only 160 x 120 or so.  Also, I’m mildly annoyed that the video starts automatically, as I’ve often got music playing already and it has a very jarring effect.  I’d prefer to select from my own clip from a list.  They have such a list on a panel on the right side of the screen with some worthwhile clips but it seems more than half the time a 10-20 second commercial plays before getting to each new video.  I think the commercial time vs. content time is weighted too heavily towards the ads, especially considering the banner ads all over the screen.  Also, when in the middle of an ad if you try to switch to another video it won’t let you until the ad finishes playing.  It makes me feel like the machines from The Terminator/The Matrix/HAL etc…are taking over already.

What I did like was that you can click on the score for tonight’s Mariner game and when arriving at the page with the recap/box score a larger video, maybe 320×240, streams effectively a 30 second highlight (or lack thereof in the Mariner’s case) without any ad’s.  The clip is a bit blocky but it’s fairly easy to follow the action. 

Now on the Mariners team site, I was expecting to see clips from tonight’s game on the homepage…Instead, in the “video corner” I was forced to watch a 20 second ad and then the highlight clip was actually from 3 days ago. Now I thought this might be due to the fact that the woeful Mariners have been short on highlight reel worthy efforts the last few days, but it turns out other MLB team webpages all have basically the same format.  Also not impressing me: the video size is even smaller than espn’s, I’m guessing maybe only 120 x 80.  When I clicked on the “audio & video” tab to see what else was offered I was blasted with a huge image adverstising their mlb.tv package for only $49.99 and the rest of the screen was several paragraphs of fine print.  After some scrounging (don’t they know I have a short attention spam?!?) I found the video for tonight’s game.  The video was the same size as ESPN’s, but everything on the team page took much longer to load and responded very slowly to new commands, although there was no ad video or banners before the highlight clip.  I was also a bit disappointed that I couldn’t find (I gave up after about 5 minutes) highlight clips of years gone by when the Mariners were actually good.  I was pleasantly amused by the section of wacky team promo commericals though.  The site also offered a several highlights for each player’s personal page, but I would have like to have seen some more personal “snacksized” videos of the players telling a funny story or something cheesy like that.  This might take a lot more work and could involve some video footage rights conflicts, but I think the multimedia aspect of the Mariners homepage needs a lot of work…Maybe if the tech people were as ‘roided up as the players they could make some progress.