We have every right to expect much from the Discovery Channel. They’ve brought high quality educational programming into our living rooms for years. We consider them a leader in educational programming. To be honest its the reason I wouldn’t settle for the basic cable television package. So I was shocked when I took a look at their web programming and found it to be too little and too inflexible.

The first step to viewing nirvana is to surf to discovery.com. You’ll see the “Video” option among the drop down navigation menus. You will be presented with a menu of about 19 choices. “Watch Full Episodes” is at the top of the list which will take you to a page where you can download a viewer. There are installation instructions for the the PC and Mac. I noticed them after clicking to install on my Mac but everything worked flawlessly. You’ll also see about 4 shows listed at the far right of the page. BIG DEAL!

You’ll also have problems resizing the player window and maintaining access to its controls. They want to hide and the size of web page elements are awkwardly absolute.

I don’t like the proprietary player. It works fine but so do all the others installed on my computer. Why should I have a player taking up precious hard disk space just to watch the Discovery Channel? The biggest disappointment is the player’s total lack of sharing and embedding capacities. This means you will not be able to include a link to the program in your web course. BOO! HISS! We can only hope the advertisers can force Discovery to expand its reach and their effectiveness by adding these important extensions.

The 4 full episodes I could view were Meerkat Manor, Project Earth, Smash Lab, and Flip that House. The only one that interested me was Project Earth. It only had 2 episodes available Wrapping Greenland and Engineering the Future. I enjoyed it but it left me wanting more.

It was hard to believe this organization had done such a poor job so I decided to have a look at shows listed outside of the full episodes. “Perhaps the folks at the Discovery Channel just didn’t understand the all of the shows should be listed under full episodes?”, I pondered.

I clicked on Deadliest Catch and caught a Swiffer advertisement followed by less than 2 minutes of the program. This was followed by another Swiffer ad followed by a 2:30 segment. It became obvious this cycle would continue until we ran out of segments. To add insult to injury the video was made available through a first-generation video player.

The Discovery Channel doesn’t understand to use the web yet. Its too bad because they have some of the best footage in the industry just waiting to be made available to web viewers and online learners.