Alex Kidman28 March 2008, 12:31 PM
The ABC’s fullscreen VOD service has gone into beta, and we’ve given it the once over. It was tough work.
There’s a bear in there… well, actually, there isn’t. ABC’s online arm has launched the Beta phase of its online, on-demand “Playback” program streaming service, but Big Ted and friends are conspicuously absent. While it was initially touted as being available to a limited pool of 5,000 ABC Community members who declared interest from the 26th of March, we only got our login details this morning. Perhaps the ABC doesn’t like us, or something.
The Playback interface is browser-based and quite slick. After an initial login – you’ve got to be a member of the ABC Community site, and the content will be IP locked to prevent overseas streaming – you’re met with a smooth, Flash-based interface for program selection. The ABC’s initially offering three channel choices: ABC Shop, ABC Real and ABC Catchup.
ABC Shop doesn’t quite replicate the full online shop experience – at least not yet – and in its beta phase, offers previews of available DVD titles. Currently, that’s limited to Bindi The Jungle Girl, Choir Of Hard Knocks, Seven Industrial Wonders and The Abbey.
ABC Real isn’t the national broadcaster’s adoption of a certain much-loathed streaming technology, but instead the place for the broadcaster to place all of its documentary offerings. The current beta offerings give you streaming access to four episodes of the Sex In The Bush series as well as The Kimberley: Land of The Wandjina.
Finally, and arguably of the most interest is the Catchup service, where programs broadcast in the last week on ABC1 and ABC2 are streamed. The initial offerings here are on the thin side, with episodes of The Bill, Good Game, At The Movies, The New Inventors and How Art Made The World on display. It’s worth noting that with the exception of How Art Made The World and The Bill – both programs not produced entirely by the ABC – the other programs are available as fully downloadable Podcasts, usually a day or so after initial airing.
Enough of the content – what’s it actually like to use?
The answer – as long as you’re on a decent broadband connection – is that it’s pretty slick. With broadband caps in mind, you’re told before you start program playback the file size. As an example, the 30 minute Tuesday night broadcast of “Good Game” clocked in at 142MB. You can build a playlist – subject to the programs still being offered when you sit down to actually watch them.
After a brief but highly frenetic ABC Catchup logo and the mandatory age restriction warning, you’re away and watching. Programs can be viewed in a window or as full screen, and we encountered no real problems accessing content on either Mac or Windows platforms. It’s possible to scrub ahead to skip dull bits of programs if required, although it wasn’t entirely clear if that might save you a few precious MB of data or not.
Being in Beta phase, we were expecting a few bugs, but hit only a couple, when the Flash interface seemingly locked up briefly in menu modes. A quick refresh seemed to cure most ills.
So the ABC has what could be a great TV watching service on its hands, but it remains to be seen how local ISPs react to it. As it stands, 140MB for every 30 minutes of television could eat into low cap broadband plans remarkably quickly, unless deals for zero cap hosting can be put into place. The ABC expects to launch the full service after a three month beta trial, with plans to introduce further channels later on into the Beta period.