VidZone apologies for excessive ad bug

VidZone has apologised to users of its PlayStation 3 video service after a bug resulted in increasingly frequent and lengthy amounts of advertising being shown in between videos.

The fluctuating advertising was "certainly not intentional" Ben Creasey, VidZone's head of production told users via the European PlayStation blog. "We would never overload you with adverts like this and we apologise for any annoyance and also ask you to keep using the service as this has now been fixed."

Creasey also took the opportunity to announce a series of improvements to the service, including true full screen viewing and support for the PlayStation Store.

The enhancements, effective immediately, have been integrated following evaluation of users' feedback, said Creasey, from tweets, blogs and Facebook messages.

The first of which will be applied to pre-roll advertising, which will be shown no more frequently than once every 15 minutes, in contrast to after every video.

All videos shot in widescreen will now be displayed in 16:9, said Creasey, while the PlayStation 3 virtual keyboard will be supported, and an improved search function integrated.

Improved PlayStation Network support will also mean online friends can see which videos users are watching, and videos will link to equivalent Rock Band tracks in the PlayStation Store for purchase.

A number of other improvements to the service include the saving of default settings, which wasn't previously possible, an increase to the cache resulting in less data being streamed, and a reduced start-up time.

VidZone was launched on PlayStation 3 in the UK, some other European territories and Australia in June, with the service due to roll out across more countries later this year.