Martyn Drake's Blog

Jennifer and I have been a TV free household for a considerable while now.  And we’re still coping nicely, thank you.  There are, however, a few issues that prevent us from accessing everything you might see on an ordinary TV.  The four main Internet catch-up services suffer from the dreaded regional licensing issues whereby certain programmes and films cannot be streamed or downloaded through these services.  Films, unless otherwise co-financed or co-produced by the broadcaster, are often off-limits as are big popular US imports (such as Family Guy).

That said, the BBC have excelled themselves this Christmas with their iPlayer.  Firstly they have been very quick to make available programs after they have first aired.  Usually this can take many hours up until a full day before aired programmes start showing up on iPlayer.  This Christmas period they’re now being made available at a much quicker pace.  Then there are films.  iPlayer is now streaming major Hollywood films through it’s service.  The Incredibles and Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End are just two of the big films that can viewed online.  For free (to those in the UK, of course).

On the other hand, the commercial catch-up services are beginning to suffer.  Firstly I’ve noticed that unlike the BBC, the quality of the video stream is considerably poorer than that their non-commercial, TV license funded competitor.  ITV is particular appalling.  When made full screen, compression artefacts make everything look horrendously blocky.  During the X-Factor programs, the constant changing of lights during the live performances turned everybody into lego men (and women) because ITV must have limited bandwidth or resources required to encode these shows in a more sensible format.  Torrents of ITV shows would, I imagine, offer better video quality to that offered by the broadcaster themselves.

The quality of these commercial streams probably lies with the (lack of) advertisers who pay to advertise their goods on them.  Judging by the same adverts repeated over and over in the same advert block, multiple times in a single program, must mean that there are very few companies choosing to advertise this way.  For example, on many ITV programs over this Christmas period we’ve seen the same Tic Tacs advert appear up to EIGHT times in a single hour’s worth of programming – repeated TWICE in each advert block.

Channel 4’s 4oD isn’t much better.  Slightly better encoding, but they too suffer from the same problem with the same old repetitive advertisers coming up again and again.  It gets to the point whereby you don’t want to buy their product or use their service because it’s far too repetitive to see the same thing.  It’s far worse than sitting through adverts on the over-to-air TV services.

Speaking of advertising on the commercial catch-up services, I’ve also noticed that the “controversial” Waitrose Christmas advert which featured a solider coming home for Christmas that was subsequently edited to remove that part, took at least two weeks to be updated on 4oD whereas from what proper TV I’ve seen during the day (whether it be at a takeaway, etc.) clearly had that part removed as soon as it was announced.  So it seems that it’s a slower process to get (or update) your advert on these services.

I had a look at Sky Player over the past day or so to see if they might offer Neil Gaiman’s short film, Statuesque, to rent.  Sky Player allows non-subscribers to watch Sky TV for either a monthly fee (identical to that of those WITH proper TV’s and satellite dishes) or a one-off fee for certain programs or films.  Sadly, Sky Player does not offer any of the Ten Minute Tales at all.  And Murdoch wants to charge you the same price for using their catch-up service as regular TV subscribers?  What a fecking liberty.  To rub salt into the wound, they don’t support the Google Chrome web browser – unlike all the other catch-up services which happily work with it.

So this Christmas, it’s been great watching the programs I do want to watch – for the most part – when I want, and for free .  I’m annoyed that Murdoch and chums have not considered opening up all of their programming to individual rental – especially when you consider the Ten Minute Tales were an original Sky Productions commission – for non-Sky subscribers.  Murdoch has long been bemoaning that the BBC makes it difficult for them to compete  in the marketplace for certain services, but yet Murdoch & chums are not making it easy for people to get their content how they want it.  Which is precisely what the BBC is doing, and doing a far better job of it to boot.

What’s also great about ditching the TV is that one doesn’t sit in front of the TV and flick channels.  It takes time to plan and choose what wants to be watched and you watch it when you want to watch it.  And to be quite frank, the lack of original ideas in the broadcasting industry these days makes it very easy for us in terms of what we choose to watch.