On Friday, CNET.com’s podcast Buzz Out Loud announced that CNET would be testing a new site design for their CNET TV website over the weekend pushing the site to about 10% of users.

I must say the new design is a great improvement on the 2.0 website, which in my opinion was a step backwards from from the original beta designs.  The biggest improvement has to be the new aspect ratio for the videos.  Wide screen has finally landed at CNET and it is looking very professional.

For the record, most of the current CNET TV library is still in 4:3 ratio but all CNET’s new videos with the exception of CNET TV LIVE appear to be being made in the 16:9 widescreen ratio.  While CNET still have a few issues to sort out, I do see this as a big step in the right direction.

CNET are controlling access to the new player via a cookie.  If you’d like to try the new design without wanting to empty your cookie cache countless times you ought to change the value of the cookie called ‘CNETTV21ab’ to ‘B’.  If you don’t know how to do this and you are a user of FireFox I recommend the FireFox Add-on called, ‘Cookie Editor’ which has an easy to use graphical user interface for manually editing cookies.

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