No more media blackout

A few weeks ago I went to visit my parents with my wife and children and stayed with them for a week or so. We like to go over a couple of times a year to visit them.

The biggest problem I usually run across when I visit is media blackout. Well not blackout so much as blurry muddle out - my Dad has internet access (WiFi around the house) and they do have Virgin Media but the TV is usually in ‘use’.

My parents have specific, set tastes in television - they know what they like and they like what they know. Which in this case usually means ITV dramas and soaps.

Fortunately, thanks to Zattoo and broadcasters realising the value of the web I now don’t have to worry about missing my favourite shows - or even having something to watch while the Bill is on my parents TV.

Getting Aunty

I can get all the BBC channels streamed live through Zattoo along with a selection of other news and entertainment channels from around Europe - and soon the Beeb will be launching the iPlayer which will give me both live BBC and on demand content (streamed or downloaded).

4OD

Channel 4 shows are fine as well because they stream the channel live and offer a very good on demand service with download or stream functionality.

ITV.com

ITV has been a pain in the past but has started to wake up with the launch of ITV.com - their on demand proposition. The problem with ITVs proposition is that it’s completely web based and even worse IE only.

But, when they finally take it out of the SOAPS only preview (soaps as in soap operas) they will have a mass of content from the last 30 days as well as the last 30 years.

They’re also live streaming their 4 main (ITV Brand) channels and putting up clips/previews of shows for you to watch as well. As you can see from the image on the right - it is a fairly simple Windows media/flash based player with the bulk of the content contained within web pages.

I started the itv.com section with a complaint about it being web based - to be honest I’m glad it’s ‘web based’ the problem I’ve got is with the streaming only option.

I’d rather the BBC and Channel 4 had links to their downloads/streams contained on a website instead of a seperate player that required system resources.

Just one player

Fine produce the player but give me the option of whether I want to use it or not.

Both players rely on the Kontiki Peer2Peer application so why not allow me to download content (regardless of whether I’m using 4od or BBC iPlayer or even SKY Anywhere) through a single downloader.

I don’t want to have to have three or four different applications running on my computer just so I can download TV shows that happen to be broadcast by different companies.

I’m happy to go to different websites (because then an RSS feed can be created that I can include to auto download my favourite shows) but I don’t like having to run different apps all the time.

Still at least they’re trying - I’m pretty much going to give up on Bit Torrent - I’m going to be able to download or at least watch TV shows from all the major broadcasters within minutes of it going out on TV for up to 30 days after in my own time without having to remember to set SKY+ before I leave.

That is service. It also means I don’t have to hunt through a dozen torrent sites to see who gets it up first if I missed it due to a programme clash, I don’t have to worry about viruses and I don’t have to wait for it to be encoded, uploaded and then seeded.

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