Many of you will have heard of Channel 4’s ‘On Demand’ video download service, allowing the public to view and download many of their programs for free withtin a week of being broadcasted. Well, it seems the BBC were also fond of this new idea and have launched their own download service for their channels, called, the iPlayer.
No, before you ask, there is no correlation between the iPlayer and the iPod or any othe Apple product for that matter. The BBC iPlayer is only a beta version, available to windows media player users solely, at first.
What’s your opinion on the iPlayer and 4: On Demand? Do you or have you ever used them? What do you think of the new digital way of watching TV? If you ask me, TVs are meant for watching TV, and computers are are meant for watching, well, anything else.
1 response so far ↓
1 Grant Gibson // Jul 27, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I tried 4OD a while back on my Media Centre PC. In theory it should be the perfect environment for IPTV - a 32″ LCD TV in the comfort of my living room.
In reality it was a long, complicated process. Downloading shows was tediously slow, and the interface for logging in and selecting your content required a mouse & keybroad combo that made a nonsense of my Media Centre setup.
As others have said elsewhere, its slower, more awkward and less convenient that downloading via BitTorrent. The only advantage is that it’s legal.
My rant continues here if anyone is interested…
http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/07/27/why-bbc-iplayer/
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