Posts Tagged ‘tv’

TVCatchup streams to mobile as broadcasters aim to spoil the party

by David Gilson

June 11th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | CommentsNo Comments

TVCatchup running on NokiaAs promised, we’re keeping you up to date with the latest happenings at TVCatchup.

Last week TVCatchup opened a private beta for streaming live TV to Blackberry, Android and Symbian phones. (Update: Palm webOS too.) However, they announced on their official forums today that the beta was going public for anyone to test the service.

To access the mobile streaming version, point your phone’s browser to: m.tvcatchup.com

According to the TVCatchup forums, Vodafone is not supporting their streams, and judging from Twitter, there seems to be mixed results on other mobile networks. Clearly, streaming video data will clog up mobile networks, so we recommend users to stick to WiFi, on which the service works well.

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TVCatchup ups its game for the World Cup

by David Gilson

May 28th, 2010 | Posted in Net TV | Comments1 Comment

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.

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Review: TVCatchup – Streaming live TV to your browser

by David Gilson

April 21st, 2010 | Posted in Net TV, Review | Comments1 Comment

tvcatchup frontpage

TVCatchup is a UK-only VoD site with a difference. When the site launched in late 2007, TVCatchup offered live streams of UK Freeview TV channels, along with the ability to record programmes. Unfortunately, copyright concerns saw TVCatchup withdraw their site, until relaunching, sans PVR functionality, in late 2008 (Source).

In its current form, TVCatchup is very simple, offering only live streams of almost all UK Freeview (free to-air) channels. The website gives a list of all available channels which can be clicked on to view. Better still, there is a TV/PVR like programme guide, showing a horizontal timeline of what’s on currently, and allows you to go forward (and back) in time to see what’s coming up. It also allows users to drag and drop TV channels into any order they like. However, there’s no EPG data available. Along with the channel list, there is a tab giving access to UK Freeview radio stations, this is in a testing phase, and during this review the audio player loaded but didn’t stream any audio. We’re sure this will be fixed soon though.

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Review: MSN Video Player mixes it up with classic TV, news & gossip

by David Gilson

April 15th, 2010 | Posted in Net TV, Review | CommentsNo Comments

MSN Video Player Front PageMSN Video Player is Microsoft’s offering into the video on demand (VoD) market, which launched last month in the UK. It’s reported to have launched with around 1000 hours of content, licensed from various sources. However, Microsoft hasn’t cut the type of deals with UK broadcasters required to enable MSN Video Player to be a way to catch up on recent TV.

The bulk of content on MSN Video player is made of back catalogue TV shows, although there is other material. The ‘Clips’ section, has sub-categories of: News, Viral, Celebrity, Sport, Gaming and “MSN Originals”. The sports content is further broken up into individual sports, but don’t get excited, as it’s just a long string of interviews with players and coaches. Viral and Celebrity videos are self-explanatory, but don’t expect to find any deep or insightful content. The news videos are quite useful, and are taken directly from ITN and MSN’s own news service. The “TV clips” and “MSN Originals” categories seem to overlap somewhat with the Celebrity videos, and are all quite random in topic and duration

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Review: SeeSaw bouncing between back-catalogue and catch-up TV

by David Gilson

April 5th, 2010 | Posted in Net TV, Review | Comments3 Comments

SeeSaw front pageSeesaw is a UK-only video on demand service, which has its origins in the ill-fated Project Kangaroo, whose technology was bought up by transmission company Arqiva. The service was launched with new branding as “SeeSaw”.

SeeSaw’s revenue currently comes from unskippable advertising that appears before and in the middle of programmes. However, premium content is said to be coming to SeeSaw later in the year. SeeSaw is limited to residents of the UK only, but on their FAQ pages, they state that viewers do not need a TV license.

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