TVCatchup, the UK TV streaming service, announced on Twitter today that they are introducing low and high quality streams along side their standard quality stream. Their tweets suggest that this is the first in a series of updates to coincide with this year’s World Cup tournament.
TVCatchup viewers can access the new streams by heading to the channels page, and then choose from the three links on the top-right corner of the channel grid. Other streaming services we’ve looked at have stream quality controls within the video player itself, allowing for in-situ bitrate adjustment. Hopefully this is something TVCatchup can add later.
TVCatchup engineers are still fine tuning the new streams as this post is being written. Although we’ve tested the streams and everything seems to be running well.
According to their tweets, low quality runs at 350 KB/s, standard quality runs at 750 KB/s and high quality runs at 1,500 KB/s. The low-quality is hoped to help with mobile devices, while the high quality streams will allow home theatre PC users to make the most of their large screens. We did our tests as soon as we heard the news, and the streams seem to be coming in at a lower rate than TVCatchup suggest. This could be due to TVCatchup engineers still fine tuning the system, or the figures could be conservative to ensure quality of service.
As already stated, this is the first in a series updates to the TV streaming service. Stay tuned to last100 for news on further developments as they happen.
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