Internet TV

I have never really been a massive fan of watching television. Very rarely will I make plans to sit down and watch an entire television series. I guess this partly comes from my busy social life, but more so the inconsistent television schedule. On occasions I have found myself committing to a television series for the broadcasting channel to air it at different times each week. So I was intrigued when I first heard of Joost, Hulu, BBC IPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD services.

I registered my interest in a Joost account when it was first mentioned last year and I was soon given access to the beta. Unfortunately I found the beta less than inspiring as the streaming of the programmes was poor because of the buffering and I found the application slow and clunky. I soon abandoned Joost.

Similarly to Joost, I registered for the Hulu beta and it was sometime until I received a beta invite. Little did I realise that Hulu is restricted to just the U.S. at the moment so currently I am unable to access what Hulu has to offer.

One of the television series that I am currently committed to is Ashes to Ashes aired by the BBC. Unfortunately I missed an episode, and so rather than downloading it via BitTorrent I decided to try out the BBC IPlayer. I didn’t have very high expectations due to my previous encounters with Joost and Hulu, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Although you are required to download a hefty 600mb application to experience to best out of the IPlayer (there is an online media player which works similarly to a Youtube video), once the application has been downloaded and installed you are able to start downloading any of the BBC’s available shows from the last seven days. The IPlayer uses peer-to-peer technology which means that a 60-minute show (roughly 600MB) will download in about 25 minutes over a 4MB connection. Much faster than I can currently through any torrents.

So, what about Channel 4’s 4oD service? Well, similarly to Joost and the IPlayer you are required to download an application which once installed allows you to select which programmes you wish to download, but also the ability to schedule future episodes of a series. Something that the IPlayer doesn’t feature.

The interface for selecting the programmes you wish to download is done through the application itself, whereas the IPlayer is done through the web browser. I have found the 4oD application a little slower and clunkier than the IPlayer application. Downloading a programme offers similar speeds to the IPlayer application but the programmes are roughly half the filesize compared to the IPlayer’s.

I must say that I am thoroughly pleased with the BBC IPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD services. They offer me the ability to watch the programmes I want, when I want. A problem that is beginning to plague the traditional television broadcast. I have even returned to Joost and it has moved on leaps and bounds since I last tried it out. Programmes now plays seamlessly and there are a lot more programmes on offer.

One comment to “Internet TV”

I can’t say I’ve tried any of the others but I admit the BBC IPlayer is a revelation. For the past few months I have been using it to catch up on shows I have missed. I’ve been reluctant to depend on it solely for all BBC shows as I do not think that every shows is released, but it is a good backup.

I have tried to download the Iplayer previously and appeared to be simply watching an episode via the web rather than a download, so I did uninistall the Iplayer but I think the web player is great on it’s own. I have experienced very little buffering, great quality for a web player and most of all almost instant availability of shows upon finishing it’s initail tv air.

Tv over IP has a long way to go still to be commercially viable for the companies that air them but I think the BBC although first out of the blocks has set a fantastic example.

Kean Richmond at 2.13 pm
on Sunday 23rd March 2008