PS3 and UK Catchup TV Services

Chris — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:13:27 +0000

It’s been a week now since the official PS3-optimised BBC iPlayer went live and I pulled the plug on the unofficial PS3iPlayer.com (it’s still available for but no-longer maintained.) As a few sites(!) are reporting, PS3 users are now accounting for around 10% of everyone using the iPlayer over the Internet (i.e. excluding Virgin’s service on their STB), pushing the PS3 into 2nd place, behind the PC (70%) and ahead of Macs (8.5%). This seems to indicate a hunger out there for an easy way to watch catchup services on a TV, without the hassle of connecting your PC or Mac up.

So, what’s the current state of play in general for catching up on missed TV using a PS3 in the UK?

BBC iPlayer
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
Interface works. Video playback works.
PS3 officially supported with PS3-specific features. All programmes stream at 1500Kbps down to 480Kbps for those with slower Internet connections.

ITV Player
www.itv.com/itvplayer
Interface works. Video does not work.
Uses Microsoft Silverlight for video playback which the PS3 does not support. Apart from that the web interface does work in most places, although the heavy use of Flash for navigation causes a few problems.

STV Player
player.stv.tv
Interface does not work. Video playback works.
ITV’s less-known Scottish cousin. Contains the majority of ITV’s content, but uses Flash instead of Silverlight. Flash player fails to load on programme pages, but PS3 can play their content with a workaround. A few framerate problems on full-screen playback.

4oD
www.channel4.com/programmes/4od
Interface does not work. Videos partially work.
The web-interface does not work in the PS3 browser (spectacularly). With a workaround to get the Flash player visible, audio works on all programmes and adverts, however video does not appear apart from the 4oD ident and a few of the adverts.

Demand Five
demand.five.tv
Interface works. Video playback works.
The normal web interface works but is not suited to use with the PS3 controller, however full-screen playback is smooth.

Sky Player
skyplayer.sky.com
Interface works. Video does not work.
Uses Microsoft Silverlight for video playback which the PS3 does not support. Despite that the actual web interface works pretty well in the PS3 browser.

The BBC is clearly well ahead of the others here, but Five’s offering is surprisingly good. STV could fix their site with some small tweaks to allow the Flash player to load correctly, but the others have far more work to do if they wish to take advantage of all those PS3 users hungry for easy-to-access TV content.

Anyway, the situation in general highlights problems both broadcasters and hardware platform owners currently have; in a world of standards, there’s very little standard across both the catchup content from the broadcasters and the environments provided by each device. In a case of “somebody else’s problem” broadcasters need to produce and distribute a large number of different encodes to cover different devices as well as produce interfaces bespoke to (or specifically optimised for) each device they wish to support. Hardware platform owners also face similar problems; specific support for each broadcaster has to be added and where 3rd-party licensed technology is used, the appropriate and often costly licenses obtained.

We can only hope that cross-broadcaster projects and standards (such as the ill-fated Project Kangaroo and the pending Project Canvas) get the green-light and are eventually widely adopted.

Ixalon.net » 4oD

PS3 and UK Catchup TV Services