Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 13:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
Well, the ads are selected from Hiro-Media's inventory on the basis of demographic information users provide when they register. There's nothing forcing you to give correct details of your income or age, but some people may be uncomfortable with the idea snyway.
A related issue is that it doesn't seem to be possible to use the same user name on two or more computers. That might be good from a privacy perspective - you can be a twentysomething Venezuelan female graduate earning $9,000 a year on one computer and a 65 year old Swiss man who only finished high school and rakes in $1 million on another.
The more honest you are, the more closely the ads will match your interests - more accurately, the more precisely advertisers can target you.
But my main beef is technical. Hiro installs more than just a codec or two. There's also a piece of software that runs permanently in the background (using between one and 10 percent of the CPU cycles on my computer). There are also various support files tucked into folders that you wouldn't normally look in when uninstalling software.
I could probably forgive that if I was able to play Hiro content, but I can't. Even though the software is installed, the effect is exactly the same as if it wasn't. The video is overlaid with a translucent box saying that I need to install Hiro, and a short way into the program the video freezes and the sound continues. I've downloaded two shows from completely separate sources, and the result is the same except that the freeze occurs 60 seconds into one and 30 seconds into the other.
Am I alone? Read on to find out.
