Boldly go ogle ABC’s iView on your new Sony Bravia IPTV

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 26 July 2010 22:24

Your IT - Entertainment

ABC iView on Sony Bravia TVs… hardly the final frontier. This is the short voyage of an iViewing enterprise, to explore strange new content missed on its original broadcast, to seek out new stars and series worth watching, to boldly chew through your metered download limits as never before.

If you want to ogle the ABC’s iView service on your shiny new Sony Bravia TV with IPTV capabilities, the service has finally gone live direct through compatible broadband-connected Bravias and accessed via remote control, despite having been available on the PS3 – and any connected TV – for some time.

There are reports of concerns that the streamed content over iView on Bravia IPTV doesn’t quite look as good on a large flat panel TV as it does on a small computer monitor, and while I haven’t seen iView on Bravia in person, I’ve certainly seen lower-bitrate content on a larger screen that made things look fuzzier than they would have at a higher definition.

But with higher definition content comes a bigger stream, and with it comes a bigger bite into your monthly download limit, unless you happen to be with the one ISP in Australia that offers a “truly unlimited” broadband plan. 

On top of that a higher quality stream option isn’t available as yet anyway, the ABC would have to start offering it first, and whatever your experience of the quality, it will undoubtedly improve in the future.

Unfortunately, even if your ISP offers unmetered access to iView on your computer or PS3, watching through the Bravia’s IPTV service will count towards your usage limits!

This is because of the way that iView is delivered to the Bravia’s internal computer, and whether ISPs or the ABC will ever be able to fix it in the future so that the content is unmetered is unknown. 

That’s a shame, but the trend towards ever bigger download limits at lower prices is at least cushioning the blow of the many legal ways to chew through large amounts of metered bandwidth.

So, if you’re lucky enough to have a new IPTV-capable Bravia TV, you now have a new IPTV channel to boldly go watch – if you aren’t already doing it through a PS3, Mac Mini or PC that is already connected!