Mel Rolle's CMS 3710 Project 2 Web Site Analysis:
Dot.Comedy.com
Multimedia
Dot.comedy's multimedia use illustrates how the site borrows heavily from television culture. Many of the streaming videos on the site are taken directly form NBC Universal's television shows and posted on the site. Horton and Lynch state that site designers should “use images, animation, video and sound only when they are relevant” to the message (Considerations for Multimedia). Dot. comedy's purpose is to entertain viewers by providing original and uncensored material. Thus, the site's designers use multimedia— mainly videos—to achieve its goal of promoting laughter among users.
Horton and Lynch suggest that multimedia content should be tailored for web delivery. Videos are the “most challenging multimedia content to deliver via the web” because of size (Web Multimedia Strategies). Horton and Lynch state that “one second of uncompressed, full-quality video requires approximately 27 megabytes of disk storage space" (Web Multimedia Strategies). Dot.comedy features short-duration videos with small amounts of bandwidth to avoid placing high demands on the user's computer. Most of the videos are less than 4 minutes long.
...In Relation to User Accessibility
Dot.comedy's multimedia content is primarily streaming videos. Horton and Lynch suggest that one of the benefits of streaming is random access (Preparing Multimedia). The audience can use the controls to access any part of the streaming video. For example, users who want to watch a fighting scene from the digital series, The Easter Bunny Hates You, can scroll forward and backward and select a starting point (See Figure 6.1 and 6.2). Dot.comedy also uses caption to provide hearing impaired users an alternate text for the audio elements of the site (See Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.1
At 1 minute and 45 seconds, users can see the introduction to the series.
Figure 6.2
At 1 minute and 18 seconds, users can see the Easter Bunny attack the man.
Figure 6.3
Alternate text for the hearing impaired.
Mel Rolle
CMS 3710
Updated: 20 April 2009