I recently came across BET’s new broadband video player called BET On Blast and was very impressed with the presentation of the video content. The UI as a whole is slick. Even the ads featured here flow seamlessly into the design and look as if they belong there, this can be hard for some designers to execute and some completely overlook it as part of the design. Paying attention to this sort of thing only strengthens a brand.

The navigation is smooth and usable with 2nd level links being presented as dropdowns in the nav and also the the right on the player. There is a clear but not overwhelming use of iconography for the “info” button. Clicking this button triggers a panel to flip and displays additional information as well as an option to email that particular video. The Playlist itself also has smooth transitions similar to the main nav, I like it but I don’t think it should slide to cove content and most importantly navigation. The only other improvement that I think could be made is to make the drag and drop functionality of each video more intuitive, the text that displays on rollover of a panel is to the point and straight forward, no doubt about that, but even so I naturally felt the need to want to drag and drop directly into the video player.

Overall I think the site is beautiful (not to mention we have a similar color pallet ) and is a great use of Flash especially when most would have opted to use AJAX.