On demand

I pay £135.50 a year to watch programmes on the telly. There were only 5 terrestrial channels in the UK — BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five. You can watch more channels if you subscribed to cable (NTL or Telewest, which are now both Virgin Media) or satellite (Sky). Now with the advent of digital broadcasting, the freeview services was launched thus giving the non-subscribers to a provider with more channels — BBC3, ITV2, E4, Film4 and most recent favourite, Dave. For me, freeview was enough for me not to continue paying around £25 a month for extra channels like MTV or the National Geographic. It had given me quite the savings as I previously paid £50/month for TV, broadband and phone services. Now, I only pay £25 for broadband and phone. Although I have been checking out other offers lately and saw that I might be paying almost the same amount for broadband and get digital TV as well from Sky for £16 per month. Phone will still have to remain at £11 a month with bloddy BT (hmp!). Anyway, I digress.

The BBC, Channel 4 and Five companies have launched their on demand services whereby viewers could watch their favourite programmes over the internet within 7 days from original broadcast on television. Five is charging to view and so is Channel 4 although they do offer free content, too. But for me personally, nothing beats BBC’s iPlayer!

(Top Gear presenters advertising BBC’s iPlayer; source: YouTube)

With the iPlayer, you can stream it online on your web browser (use Firefox!) anytime or you can download it and watch it offline for up to 30 days. It is using peer-to-peer technology to enable the distribution of large video files to scale effectively (source: Wikipedia). It is not, however, possible for the downloaded programmes to be copied onto another media like CD or memory stick, which I think is fair. The reliability and quality of the service plus the length of time the good programmes are available actually stops people from obtaining an illegal copy.

The programmes on iPlayer are still free to watch and download whilst both 4OD (Channel 4) and Five Download Manager have paid content. Some people are saying that having a paid service is unfair because we already pay the TV licence. True but then again, if by purchasing these media, you are legally entitled to keep them for a longer period of time, then it is no different from buying a DVD of these TV programmes. But frankly, if BBC starts to charge as well, then it might not be as popular as it stands today.

Through iPlayer, I was able to follow the latest series of Sir David Attenborough entitled Life in Cold Blood. It was shown on Monday nights at 9pm and I usually have tango classes on that same night. If it weren’t for iPlayer, I would have missed a brillliant documentary. The last episode was aired tonight but as I also wanted to catch Numb3rs on FiveUS, I have relied on the fact that I am able to download it and watch it later — which I am, after I finish this post!

iPlayer