Web site: Are there really "thousands of TV programmes and films" available in the free on demand li

TaliskaTaliska Member Posts: 64
edited 6 March 2017, 10:48PM in Archived Posts
http://www.youview.com/whats-on/

Quote:

"Free catch up and on demand

Catch up on the last 7 days of TV and find thousands of TV programmes and films in our on demand library. All ready to watch instantly, whenever suits you best."

Can someone in YV check that there are 'thousands' available on 'free' services as I am unsure that there are.

This, I think, is potentially a case of confusion marketing. It would be a very reasonable for a reader to make the assumption that on demand content was free (just in case it's only the catch-up that's defined as 'free') and therefore that thousands of programmes were also free.

This may need to be revised to be made much clearer.

Taliska

Comments

  • VisionmanVisionman Member, Super User Posts: 9,856 ✭✭✭
    edited 26 February 2017, 2:39PM
    Web site: Are there really "thousands of TV programmes and films" available in the free on demand library?
    ---------------------------------------
    Don't you know if there are?
    I'm now happy with the disagree icon, because its gone.
  • TaliskaTaliska Member Posts: 64
    edited 22 February 2014, 1:42PM
    Visionman said:

    Web site: Are there really "thousands of TV programmes and films" available in the free on demand library?
    ---------------------------------------
    Don't you know if there are?

    Sorry?
  • Simon BurrSimon Burr Member Posts: 19
    edited 2 November 2012, 10:23AM
    With C4 having most of its 30 years of programming on demand there are thousands of shows and films on demand. So no there isn't an error on the website.
  • Carl1Carl1 Member Posts: 14
    edited 2 November 2012, 10:23AM
    I agree with Simon. With the BBC, ITV, 4OD and Ch5 VoD services, there are indeed thousands of programmes.
  • TaliskaTaliska Member Posts: 64
    edited 22 February 2014, 1:42PM
    Fair enough! :-)

    Might look a little closer at C4's on demand offering.

    Taliska
  • Simon BurrSimon Burr Member Posts: 19
    edited 2 November 2012, 9:51AM
    I know 4OD isn't offering everything it holds on the computer based service but there are lots of box sets too such as Father Ted and Inbetweeners and if we just take those two series there are 36 shows, Iplayer from the bbc is holding the more popular shows such as Waterloo Road and The thick of it in box set too. ITV I'm not so sure on as I don't watch a lot on that network.
  • KeithKeith Member, Super User Posts: 2,439 ✭✭✭
    edited 4 March 2017, 10:29AM
    In a discussion recently I believe I heard it said that on the purely free access there were 15000 items and that on a premium/non-free service (e.g. BT or TalkTalk) the additional content raises this number to 23000 items.

    If one looks at say 4oD they appear to have about 1000 different 'shows' available and whilst many may be single items others have 50+ episodes so their content alone is significant.
  • Andrew MarlowAndrew Marlow Member Posts: 65
    edited 22 November 2012, 8:05AM
    I am very disappointed with what is available On Demand. I have a large collection of various series on DVD so I am more particular than most in what I look for in On Demand. I have found only a handful of series of interest and there seem to be hardly any films. This has stopped me from using On Demand.

    I don't bother with catchup since I have already setup series recordings for anything of interest. So with On Demand being of almost no practical use (plus the infamous YVM104 when I do use it) this means my YouView machine is just a very expensive recorder.

    Whenever I raised the issue of lack of content I was told "more is coming soon" then eventually NowTV was released. But NowTV is subscription based! At 15 pounds a month this is more expensive than NetFlix and LoveFilms put together!
  • Simon BurrSimon Burr Member Posts: 19
    edited 4 November 2012, 2:21PM
    Its like everything that is new, you have to give it time. The problem is the way people are now days they want everything yesterday! Me and my family have had YouView for 2 weeks now and have had something to watch all the time, updates on the on demand have been coming on daily so give the box a chance and everyone will be happy. This makes me so sad that people are critical of anything new and is not sky or virgin. YouView is and will be the next big thing and in 6 months time all the critics will be changing there song. But maybe just maybe on demand should have been set up after looking at the few critics dvd collection so there not upset!
  • UnknownUnknown
    edited 26 September 2013, 8:33AM
    Simon wrote:

    "This makes me so sad that people are critical of anything new and is not sky or virgin. YouView is and will be the next big thing and in 6 months time all the critics will be changing there song."

    Agree, you can already see the first signs of this with scooping of three major awards and increasingly less favourable comparisons of Freesat with YouVIew.
  • ScuttlebroomScuttlebroom Member Posts: 279 ✭
    edited 13 November 2013, 10:01AM
    I agree with Simon, but unfortunately you will always get the naysayers for everything, it is the same with reviews of restaurants and hotels (I was in hospitality many years ago and I was always reminded that if you get it wrong one person will tell everyone, but if you get it right they will only tell a few!) As you can't please everyone, and I for one always have an open mind, and hopefully YouView will simply get better and better!

    And as a counter view to Andrew Marlow:

    I have found the YouView box to have better access to series such as BBC's Great British Bake Off, which i missed the revisited episode, and I used my existing HDR Fox T2 to see if it was on there, (I hadn't turned on my YouView box, so thought it would be quicker!) but it wasn't listed on the BBC iPlayer on the HDR, however, i found the whole series of GBBO on the YouView box, simply by typing into search Great British, and was very happy to see all the programmes were there, simply chose the appropriate episode and pressed OK and was happily watching the episode I missed!

    Thanks YouView for having the foresight to ask your content partners to have whole series available!
  • ShawnLindsayShawnLindsay Member Posts: 6
    edited 9 December 2012, 6:09PM
    throughout the Free On Demand players the BBC and 4od have a great collection, with most of their programming on YouView but i am disappointed with C5 and ITV
  • Chris__M1Chris__M1 Member Posts: 136
    edited 9 December 2012, 6:17PM
    I find that On Demand is particularly useful when I only discover a "new" show on about episode 3.

    It may have been something I hadn't heard was on, or perhaps decided wasn't my kind of thing; then one idle evening with nothing else on, I'd glance at it, and think "this is great".

    Series recording is great, but it doesn't come with a crystal ball.

    Then there are things that completely passed you by when originally on - I have recently watched 2 series of Green Wing, which I knew about, but had never looked at.

    Then there are things you did see, and then think "I'd really like to see that again!". Along those lines, I can really recommend The Devil's Whore (4OD), which I loved the first time round, but many of my friends have never heard of.
  • Chris__M1Chris__M1 Member Posts: 136
    edited 4 November 2012, 4:07PM
    ShawnLindsay said:

    throughout the Free On Demand players the BBC and 4od have a great collection, with most of their programming on YouView but i am disappointed with C5 and ITV

    If you consider that a lot of C5's output are US shows; there will be licensing issues with having shows on catchup for extended periods, and in some cases, at all.
  • Simon BurrSimon Burr Member Posts: 19
    edited 9 December 2012, 6:17PM
    I did exactly the same as Chris with a show on BBC called Cuckoo I planned to watch the show but missed it and there it was all 6 episodes. For a service being provided for basically free minus cost of the box it's good when you think for the same thing on other providers its only available with a subscription.
  • UnknownUnknown
    edited 8 January 2015, 4:53PM
    I tend to agree with Taliska:

    "It would be very reasonable for a reader to make the assumption that on demand content was free... ...and therefore that thousands of programmes were also free."

    I naively expected a lot of free on demand films. So I was pretty disappointed when I got TalkTalk's YouView box a week ago to find that the only free films are those from BBC/ITV/Ch4/Ch5 and there aren't many of those!

    I've been using Netflix for some time so the prospect of renting films from Lovefilm Box Office at £3.50 per film doesn't appeal too much. That leaves the Sky Movies Boost at £15 per month or NowTV at £15 per month - and that's a big jump from Netflix at £6 per month.

    The good news is that after a bit of research it seems that about 80% of the films on the live channels of Sky Movies Boost are also available on NowTV. (I find this surprising as it makes the Sky Movies Boost pretty unattractive, especially as it's live channels are far less convenient than on demand viewing.)

    So I guess that for now I'll have to bite the bullet and subscribe to NowTV, and like many others hope that Lovefilm Instant will soon be added.
  • Mr A MarlowMr A Marlow Member Posts: 11
    edited 9 December 2012, 12:24PM
    I think it is misrepresentation for YouView to talk about thousands of subscription free programmes and films. Based on searching I have done on the box there seem to less than 3 thousand items altogether. The vast majority of these are NowTV, i.e. subscription. The simple fact is that if you want a large collection of films available then you have to subscribe to something, either sky, virgin, NowTV, NetFlix or whatever. YouView do not make this clear at all.
  • KeithKeith Member, Super User Posts: 2,439 ✭✭✭
    edited 4 March 2017, 10:29AM
    Writing a quick one liner to parse the HTML from http://www.channel4.com/programmes/4o... , extract the total episode counts and add them up gives a total of about 4000 items available via 4oD. This of course includes 4Music but looking just at that alone reveals there are about 100 items there so that still leaves about 4000 programmes to watch. No doubt some of these are then not available via YouView due to rights issues but even so it seems likely that there are 3000 or so items from 4oD alone.

    Doing something similar for the ITV player listing at http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/atoz/ produces a result of only about 1000 items available although as with the 4oD player some items will not be available via YouView.

    The iPlayer and Demand 5 listings are not as simple to quickly manipulate so I've not tried but I would expect together they would offer several thousand more items.

    So whilst far from conclusive (and I may have even got my one liners wrong) it does seem there will be well over 3000 freely available items and probably more like 6000-10000 or perhaps even more. This does not necessarily get up to the 15000 free items I mentioned above although that may still be plausible.

    What would really help would be if a YouView person could post some more specific (round) figures that they must surely have which would save us from having to guess or estimate etc from what data we can easily see.
  • Alan BellAlan Bell Member Posts: 6
    edited 12 December 2012, 2:45AM
    gwatuk said:

    I tend to agree with Taliska:

    "It would be very reasonable for a reader to make the assumption that on demand content was free... ...and therefore that thousands of programmes were also free."

    I naively expected a lot of free on demand films. So I was pretty disappointed when I got TalkTalk's YouView box a week ago to find that the only free films are those from BBC/ITV/Ch4/Ch5 and there aren't many of those!

    I've been using Netflix for some time so the prospect of renting films from Lovefilm Box Office at £3.50 per film doesn't appeal too much. That leaves the Sky Movies Boost at £15 per month or NowTV at £15 per month - and that's a big jump from Netflix at £6 per month.

    The good news is that after a bit of research it seems that about 80% of the films on the live channels of Sky Movies Boost are also available on NowTV. (I find this surprising as it makes the Sky Movies Boost pretty unattractive, especially as it's live channels are far less convenient than on demand viewing.)

    So I guess that for now I'll have to bite the bullet and subscribe to NowTV, and like many others hope that Lovefilm Instant will soon be added.

    I've just bought a YouView box and subscribed to Now TV, at the same time as cancelling my Lovefilm subscription because there just wasn't anything left to watch.

    Don't expect Lovefilm to be great because it isn't. There are a lot of B-movies, films are older and the content is updated infrequently.
  • RoyRoy Member, Super User Posts: 15,897 ✭✭✭
    edited 6 March 2017, 10:48PM
    You might also ask are there 'millions of customers' waiting to help you on this forum, as the entrance portal proclaims?

    As the actual count is just over a thousand, according to the top of the page when you enter. And in practice, 90% of those 1000 are asking, not answering, or have already asked, got an answer, and gone.

    I wonder if there are even 'millions of customers' with a box at all, yet. Tens or low hundreds of thousands tops, at present, I'd guess
    These tests for COVID-19 get right up my nose.
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