Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello. here is my review of the BBC iPlayer and ITV's catchup service.

*****

This afternoon I tried to watch the finale of Pushing Daisies on ITV catchup. The first thing I noticed was that they archive their shows for 30 days, rather than the BBC's paltry 7. After that, it was sadly downhill, due to poor buffering, a lack of fast forward, and unskippable clickable adverts. At least it was easy to find the show I wanted in the first place though.

The BBC iPlayer, by comparison, has never once buffered any content, and includes a small skippable ident at the start of the programme. Plus I can fast forward to any point in the show.

*****

Well, it wasn't really a review - I just wanted a more eloquent way of expressing my displaeasure at ITV's Catchup service. How has everyone else found the two services?

I haven't used ITV's player, but I've used Channel 4's and don't really have any complaints. I don't like how you have to select your programme from a drop-down list though; I want thumbnails, damnit. They don't show adverts either, as far as I've seen so far.

I love iPlayer. I can't really fault it.

iPlayer is brill. not much to say about it.

ITV's is, as you say, buffery as hell, and has annoying breaks in it.

Actually, I have nothing to add to your first post, so I probably should have just quoted you and put in a "this" Dimlie.

That's now an ambition of mine. I will never be so profound again.

I wonder if there's any other way ITV could have done catchup without unskipable ads whilst still keeping ad revenue going. Hmm. Still there's always usenet, joox, torrents etc for what you really need.

ITV and C4 use the commercial version of iPlayer, apparently.

Do Channel 4 have an iPlayer-type tool, then? Can someone point me to it, because I am too stupid to find it

Without looking (as I'm inherently lazy), it's something like http://www.channel4.com/4od.

http://www.channel4.com/watch_online/ is the one I use.

I assume this is it - http://www.channel4.com/watch_online/

6h, i thought it was something different to the 4 on-demand thing. that needs you to download things, doesn't it? Either way it's windows only, so no good for me.

Sorry, I assumed it was something like the iPlayer, which I love.

I don't think you have to download anything for the free catchup (not 4OD) — it's just a media player embedded in your browser. I could be wrong as I haven't used it in a fair while.

I just tried it and it said you have to be using IE 6 or 7 on a windows pc (I'm using Firefox). It did say I could download a plugin for Firefox 2, but I was already fedup (and it looked like it was a WMP plugin). I can't imagine Mac/Linux users are going to have any joy.

Edit - Don't worry Mimi, Mac users can still watch tv clips - http://www.channel4.com/video/. Aren't you lucky?

Ah, sod that. Cheers for checking for me though. These gravy-coated chips are far more important than Channel 4.

The ITV player didn't work straight off in Opera either. I had to download Silverlight the plug-in from Microsoft, and then a javascript hack, and still it dodn't work, so I had to open Internet Explorer.

Cheers very much, Joans. I have bookmarked it but I don't often watch clips (most of those are only a minute r so long) I really wanted it for watching episodes of things like Derren Brown, but it was reality only for convenience. There are places to download such things from, I'm just being a lazy Mimi and it's nice to be able to catch up on things without worrying about share ratios and the like.

Sorry, I was missing my sarcastic Dimlie (whichever one that might be). I figured the clips wouldn't be of any use to you at all.

Sky do one now, but it needs registration http://www.sky.com/skyplayer

I registered for this last week...and its pretty sweet really...the video quality isnt the best but its no worse than any of the other services. And the fact you can save the file as a WMP file and watch it on the xbox is a real bonus for people like me who hate watching stuff on their computer screens.

To be fair, at least the BBC are actually showing all the episodes of Heroes on actual telly, unlike ITV with Pushing Daisies. And despite the fact that it's on at around 11pm, ITV1 still show the edited non-sweary versions of Dexter.

ITV's handling of their web video is really infuriating. For example, they've quite magnificently put all the surviving footage of Michael Palin's television debut online - http://www.itvlocal.com/wales/50/?playe ... oid=144806 - only they've not really bothered telling anyone who didn't watch an overly long documentary series about ITV in Wales ("Your Channel", in case you're wondering) about it. And they've put it online in an annoying streaming video format that most browsers won't play, while any two-bit chancer is able to post ILLEGAL PIRATE LIVE STREAMING of ACTUAL LIVE TELEVISION on the web that just about any browser more recent than Netscape 2.0 will play.

I know there's the tiresome issue of 'rights' to worry about, but when you're hosting a load of genuinely interesting content that isn't substantial enough to have any real commercial value, there's a pretty good PR boost right there. And if there's one thing ITV could do with right now, it's some decent PR. For flips sake, they hold the right to arguably the three most internationally popular television programmes the UK has ever produced (The Avengers, The Muppet Show and The World At War), and what's on ITV3 all day? The Wonder Years, Ironside, Due South, and Clocking Off (which was a BBC show). Hell, I'd sooner tune in for repeats of Granada Reports that that lot.

Oh

I knew that would never be of any use to me but thought sweet of you to look anyway, so thanked you none the less as I thought you were genuinely saying that I was lucky. I did not get the sarcasm

Do you have to be a Sky customer to watch theirs?

I don't think so , no.

So apparently not, but I haven't tried yet. But presumably it's massively limited if you're not a Sky customer.

From what I can see you have to pay for everything if you're not already a sky subscriber. If you are, then you get free stuff based on your current subscription.

If sky decide to allow live streaming of their channels on that service then I'd sub to at least the base mixes just for that.



Dexter on ITV. 11:00 - 11:02pm.

I really wish the iplayer would let me buffer.

I don't even understand why it doesn't, wouldn't it use the same amount of bandwidth to do so?

Yes, I have this problem with the flash-based iPlayer. I'm only on a 512k connection and not even that most of the time. On a *good* day you might get 5 minutes of a programme between buffering. There seems to be no way to improve this..

I guess it's a fixed and tiny buffer to make it work on as many browsers as possible, including on things like the Wii which might not have much ram. Or perhaps it's a limitation of flash..

However, on my iPhone, if you pause the programme, it continues to download the video file, filling up the progress bar! This means that you can pause it for a minute or two at the start and then watch the whole thing uninterrupted. Fantastic!

I did find a way to download the video file that the iPhone uses on my desktop machine when the service was first launched, but they quickly changed something and it became quite difficult to do. So I'm planning to either buy a TV-out lead for the iPhone or hang on until someone gets the files to be downloadable again.

There's also a Windows application based iPlayer which also downloads the whole thing (I think it works on a p2p basis?) which would do the job, but I don't particularly want to have parallels running all the time just for this.

Due South is most excellent. Thankyou kindly.

http://labsix.net/beeb/

http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/27354/ ... downloader

Not sure if they've been updated to get round the latest "protection" the BBC started using a few days ago (which renders the files unplayable unless you do some stuff to them); see http://beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/Beebhack for more info.