Web site: Are there really "thousands of TV programmes and films" available in the free on demand li
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
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
0
Comments
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Don't you know if there are?
Might look a little closer at C4's on demand offering.
Taliska
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.
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!
"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.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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