Telly On Demand

[Stuart Cosgrove]

Friday saw the official launch of the revitalised 4oD on Channel4.com. In addition to Catch-Up there are thousands of hours of Archive programmes from Comic Strip Presents to The Mark of Cain.

Over the weekend well over 300,000 Archive programmes were viewed on 4OD.

Everything works on Macs as well as Windows PCs and no software installation is required. Just find the programme, click Play and you’re away.

Please enjoy the service and tell your friends and family about it. A top-drawer TV trail is now live on Channel 4 but can also be viewed online here.

[Damien Smith]

Colm - have you tried a proxy IP? I use the following service to access the iPlayer when out of the country - planning to try out the American IP it also offers to check out Hulu's content.

https://www.xroxy.com/premium.html

[Joe Tree]

Now there's an idea.

[Stuart Cosgrove]

Torrents of Skins - tut tut, you'll encouraging people to share digital photographs next.

[Joe Tree]

Us Mac users do watch telly, we just do it on our Mac.

Brilliant news. Even after a quick first glance, really impressed by the amount of archive material there - sets it apart from the iPlayer. No need to go looking for torrents of Skins any more...!

[Stuart Cosgrove]

At last MAc users like Damien Smith can get off my case - didn't think any of them actually watched Telly, what with all those Otto Dix exhibitions at the Tate.

Colm apols about Republic of Ireland we are desperate for a solution but short of being taken to court by RTE, UK indies and the US studio majors we are restricted for now - as for the future Mountjoy here I come.

[Colm Tobin]

Perhaps I should have been more thorough before I posted. From the 4OD FAQ -

I live in the Republic of Ireland and I used to be able to watch programmes via the 4oD service on Channel4.com. Why I am no longer able to do this?
There are some programmes for which we do not have rights in the Republic of Ireland. We are not, at the present time, able to just block specific programmes on the 4oD service and therefore we have unfortunately had to block the entire service in this region. We are in continual discussions with our content providers, and we are looking to find a solution to make Channel 4 content available on demand in the ROI.

[Colm Tobin]

It looks brilliant, Stuart. Unfortunately, us poor folk in the Republic of Ireland can't access any of the content even though we could use the old, clumsy 4OD app. We also can't use the iPlayer - I wonder if there is some way to open this up? Granted, people in the UK won't be rushing to look at the new RTE player so some sort of rights swap wouldn't work. It's very annoying for those of use who watch a lot of British TV as well as our own domestic channels. Seeing as we obviously don't pay the UK licence fee over there and our own is barely enough to cover domestic output I don't see how this is going to change - unless some sort of subscription model opens up via cable.

[Damien Smith]

At last - death to Kontiki and the horrible Microsoft DRM and download manager.

BBC were considering using it for iPlayer but saw the light at the last minute, otherwise things could have turned out very differently. Nice to see C4 finally recognise the Mac user also - they never struck me as an "I'm a PC" company (cue torrent of 'pretty box' comments).