Very impressed with "Motherload"

I finally tried the debut of Comedy Central's new broadband channel, Motherload. I figued out how to get the full-blown Flash 8, drag-and-drop personalized production like MTV Overdrive or NFL Network. (I launched my station's new vidcasts yesterday, coinciding with our existing streaming services, so I'm in this mindset.) You can personalize the content by (re)assembling your own playlist. But browsing to the page for the first time in Firefox, I had to download some plugins to get it to load right.

The quality of the video itself is phenomenal, being 320-x-240 Windows Media clips (you can't resize them though) encoded at 780 Kbps. It's unbelievably clear with rich sound, and I didn't experience any "suffering through buffering". The streaming clips are split into short skits or previews, which I like. Chapelle's Show looked incredible, and that's saying a lot because I've seen the skits hundreds of times already and know them back-to-front. There are even a few web-exclusive clips.

The ability to search video was cool, using both a drop-down box and a full-text input box, so you can quickly navigate past all the cheese and head straight for the meat. I'd like to eventually see full-blown episodes in Apple's iTunes Music Store, too. The streams serve as a great teaser to coerce me to purchase the full-length, optimal quality product, akin to Pandora's method, which includes "buy this music" links for both individual tracks in ITMS and the entire CD from Amazon. Since Comedy Central has made name for itself in retailing DVDs - unlike VH1 - I would think this to be a very natural step.

But...too bad Mac people. After getting my ya-yas off of the content in MSIE 6+ and Firefox on my Windows XP Pro box, I tried to replicate the hilarity in Safari on my OS X machine, and got this: We're sorry, but MotherLoad will only play on PCs with Windows XP or 2000/SP4+. Click below to make sure you launch our standard media player for video (except Motherload exclusives).

At any rate, I'll be loading & laughing Motherload for the next few days. Good show, CC!