progress

As the television and internet worlds continue to merge, its interesting to see the ways they adopt cues from each other. NBC's current on-air look, created by design firm Capacity, beautifully takes its cues from the internet to reference interactivity. One of my favorite networks, Current, has always had a progress bar during each of its segments. Today I noticed CNN use the progress bar in reverse to countdown the seconds left in a commercial break. They only used it occasionally, not consistently, which could be dangerous because it calls attention to the breaks that they don't use it in (which are longer); but its still an interesting twist that I'll be curious to see if its use becomes more common. In some ways, its nothing more than a new twist on formatted lines in my old radio DJ days like "you're never more than 10 minutes away from another 10 hot songs in a row..." The more things change, the more they stay the same.