Spent an hour this morning playing around with Fancast, the TV channel guide / trailer depo / streaming video portal that Comcast debuted at CES this week. Overall, it’s a gorgeous site that has the potential to be a great video directory, but Comcast needs to improve several aspects of the user experience. Here are a few of my initial observations:

1. When you skip ahead in a movie or show, the first thing you’re likely to see is a commercial. Not sure that’s the best way to include advertisements, since it may be too disruptive to the viewer. Especially if the viewer is looking for a specific segment, and they have to skip around multiple times to find it.  Plus you can’t pause the commercials, which seems like an obviously convenient feature to build in.
2. Each of the movies and TV shows have a different expiration date, but there doesn’t seem to get a holistic overview of expiry dates for all video. So, it’s hard to plan what to watch first.
3. Each show has tags, but no way to add your own. Understandable, but given that tags are just being used as keywords, why devote a menu item to them. Listing the keywords below the movie description would be as effective and less clutterful.
   It’s almost as if Comcast is giving a nod to user-generated features, but not embracing the concept — after all, there’s no way to post comments on videos either, and Fancast doesn’t include user-generated video (more on that below).
4. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out if a TV show is available to watch immediately. For example, while watching The Family Guy, I clicked on the show TMNT under “Related” and was taken to that show’s page, only to find out it was available on DVD, not fancast.com.
5. the label “Watch Now” can be misleading. Example: Currently the movie “Lions for Lambs” is promo’d on the homepage with a link that says “Watch Video”. When you click that link, you’re taken to the trailer. Not what’s expected. When I went back, I saw a second link, “Last chance on demand”, which took me to a page that said the show was ending it’s run on Comcast’s On Demand service after today.

Fancast sits at the tension point between Comcast’s desire to promote its networks’ long-form content and the Web’s user-generated, social abilities.

It’s a good directory for TV and DVD content, but not UGC video. That’s probably a good decision on Comcast’s part; Fancast can’t battle YouTube. I certainly would never consider using a TV company’s web site to find content created online.

But Comcast should consider adding the ability for users to comment, add tags, and interact with each other around the videos. Conversations spark pageviews, and pageviews spark ad dollars.