PDC 05 Video Sessions Online: Could It Have Been Done Worse?

Microsoft has posted the PDC 05 session videos online.

I was at PDC 05, but there were so many good concurrent sessions that there's a lot of content I've been waiting to see on the DVDs.

The first thing they did wrong is releasing the content on the web before sending the DVDs to the attendees. We're the ones who paid the big $$ to attend, shouldn't we get first crack at the videos (even if only by a few days)?

Next, they made the a website that's incompatible with Firefox. This is because they used Microsoft Producer, which generates sites that don't work in Firefox. Inexcusable, especially for a tech audience (who are more likely than the general public to be using Firefox). There's nothing on this site that needs anything IE-specific; it's just sloppy.

If I handed you 27 gigs of video content and said "thousands of people are going to want to download this, please put it online", what would you do? That's right, you'd set up BitTorrent. This is the problem that BitTorrent was designed to solve, and this is a perfect application of it. But no, Microsoft is apparently paying SiteStream to host the content, and they're doing a terrible job of it. Lots of folks are complaining about downloading at only 3 or 4 kb/sec; I wish I was that lucky. I'm zooming along at 2.84kb/sec right now.

I'll comment on the video quality once I get my first one downloaded. Only 19 hours to go!