I frequent ESPN’s website for my dose of sports, mostly for their football coverage, but in the last month or two, a video automatically starts on the right sidebar. It usually starts with a commercial followed by their sports coverage. The quality of their video content is fine, that isn’t the issue. The issue is I want to choose to watch it rather than having it forced down my throat.

A few things come to mind when I see this:

1) What about the people with slow connections?

2) What about the all of the bandwidth they’re wasting on people who don’t want to see the video?

3) How annoyed are their visitors?

I’m usually not too annoyed by the video since I can turn it off, but as of lately, I haven’t been able to turn it off until the commercial is over. I do understand they’re in the business of making money, but where do they draw the line?