ITV Catch Up


ITV Catch Up

And I complained about the iPlayer (which incidentally is brilliant on the iPhone).

I noticed the ITV Catchup on TV last night and thought I’d give it a try as looked to be cross platform. As it turns out it may or may not be depending on the availability of a Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Against my better judgement I installed it and gave it a try.

Immediate disappointment.

Audio and graphical glitches, and OMG, how poor is the video encoding. Did they use the lowest setting? Its unbelievably poor. I was going to give it the benefit of the doubt with the glitches as its Beta on the Mac and all that but I’m reliably informed that it does that on Windows too.

Ok, so we don’t get downloads (yet) on Mac with the iPlayer but that aside; come back iPlayer, all is forgiven.

Just look at the artefacts on this screen shot…

Picture 1.png

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April 8th, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Redsmartie
Posted on:
April 8, 2008 at 5:08 pm

I can’t even begin to tell you how bad full screen is.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
kyussmondo
Posted on:
May 31, 2008 at 6:39 pm

I didn’t find it too bad. Surprise surprise though ITV being the last ones for on-demand. They were the last on Sky Digital…this is the problem with ITV.

Oh well, no great loss. There are pretty much no programmes I watch on ITV about from BTCC. Get Piers Morgan off Britains Got Talent and I may watch that. People criticise the BBC but it is the only TV I watch regularly. Top Gear, Have I Got News For You, Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, The Apprentice and QI.

Props to Microsoft though for providing Silverlight for Mac and Safari. I remember reading somewhere a week ago that it didn’t work, so wasn’t expecting it to work, but a quick download and I was viewing the garbage from ITV catch-up :D

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Redsmartie
Posted on:
May 31, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Its poor in that BBC have demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be like that. I was never a fan of the iPlayer from a Mac perspective but the quality is spot on.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
joe
Posted on:
July 1, 2008 at 8:24 pm

itv version of iplayer is rubbish! i cant get it work! it says download something called silverlight so thats what i do and i restart my browser (firefox) and it tells me to download again – it just loops and all i want to do is watch the video!!! whats the point of having this catch up service if it dosent even work!!!

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Simon t
Posted on:
September 27, 2008 at 7:46 pm

I can’t even get it to work whilst the BBC equivalent runs great!

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Redsmartie
Posted on:
June 23, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Who is Virgilio Anderson?