TV on Demand - 4oD
Filed under: Other, TV, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 11:03 pm
For a while now, I’ve been wondering about TV on Demand and it’s place in the United Kingdom. Do I really need such a device, or would it be better if I stuck with good old VHS tapes.
After a curious advertising campaign, I installed and used Channel 4’s “4oD” service. Quite simply, you can rent TV shows from the varied history of the channel, to view on your PC. Sounds good enough in terms of selection, since there’s a ton of US imports, entertainment, films from the FilmFour back catalogue…
The service itself is pretty OK. The menu system is useable, downloading and viewing is dealt with in a coherent manner, and there’s a great visual style that not many other people could match at the moment.
Sadly, 4oD is let down by a few simple things. At the moment, you must be using Windows XP (No Mac support yet) with Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, purely because of all the DRM related stuff wrapping each programme. That also means you can’t put them onto portable devices either, which is a bit of a pain.
It’s also a bit extortionate to charge £0.99 per episode of a show when a complete and long series of a show could cost more than a DVD of it on Ebay if you look hard enough. Granted, some shows are free to view, but the high price for an episode that you can only keep for 48 hours makes it a huge turn off.
The quality of the programme on my screen does not help things either. I’m used to high resolution videos on my screen, and seeing low-res video at full screen isn’t pretty. It’s not DVD quality, because that would push the file sizes up, but the entire nature of the computer screen does not lend itself to the idea of the service at all. Watching it normal sized isn’t great either.
For quick catch-ups of free content on the service, it’s ok. As a service to pay for rentals of episodes of shows, it’s too expensive and does not please as much as it should do for the price you end up paying.