ABC's iView streams TV shows across the net for free

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 24 July 2008 09:40

Opinion and Analysis

An Australian TV station has finally made  free "catch up" programming and other content available via the Internet at reasonable resolutions. Readers in the US and UK may wonder what the fuss is about, but the ABC's iView service comes as a breath of fresh air.

Where other networks are offering a very limited selection of complete shows (sometimes requiring the installation of a non-standard codec), highlight clips, or low resolution streams, iView delivers a fair range of content with what I'd describe as approaching VHS quality when displayed at around 1000 pixels wide.

Full screen viewing on a modern hi-res display (eg 1920 x 1200 pixels) isn't really satisfactory, and is nowhere near the quality you get with live or recorded digital TV SD content.

"We're way out in front, again, and we think we're offering our audiences a service that they're going to, once they get to know us and get familiar with us, they're really going to embrace and use a lot," said Kim Dalton, head of television at the ABC.

Well, maybe.

As I see it, the main problem is that it only allows for streaming, not downloading for later viewing. This is a particular problem for Australia, where broadband plans generally have quite low download limits that are eked out by taking advantage of off-peak quotas as much as possible - and most people's peak TV watching times don't coincide with ISP's off-peak periods.

So what's the ABC going to do about that? See page 2 for the answer.