ABC TV has done a great thing and launched their iView service. To quote their web site it “is a new way to watch TV – a free internet (sic) broadcasting service that lets you watch ABC programs on your computer…”
The key phrase to note there is broadcasting. It correctly sums this up, the data is streamed to your PC or Mac. More importantly it is NOT downloaded in the sense that most people understand.
This is important to understand as I have heard people – in the media, including the ABC – refer to iView as allowing you to “download shows”. Bzzz. No it doesn’t.
To explain.
Broadcasting (or Streaming) is where the digital data that makes up the TV show is sent ‘live’ to your PC – sourced from the ABC – and you watch it ‘live’. So when you request iView to start playing an episode of The Gruen Transfer, it starts to do it, basically just for you. Video on demand.
However it is not stored on your PC as such and you must be connected to the Internet to watch it. You cannot save it and watch it later, including if you go offline ; disconnect from the Internet.
Downloading, to most people, is saving the whole TV show as a file to your PC, then watching it whenever you want, including offline. You usually must wait till the whole thing is downloaded. However the ABC is obviously reluctant to allow you to save a copy of their programs to your hard drive.
In reality, of course, it is a bit more complicated:
- iView, as I understand it, may store a portion of the program on your PC. Why? To ease the load on their servers. I believe that when you use iView to watch (say) The Gruen Transfer, it checks to see if other users are also watching it at the same time. So rather than you get it all from the one place – the ABC’s servers – you can get parts of it from others users. Spread the workload. It happens ‘in the background’ and is called Peer-to-Peer
- No doubt someone will quickly hack iView to allow you to save the streamed show to your PC. So you can watch it whenever you want. iView has been around officially for a week and I’d be surprised if it isn’t ‘broken’ like this already.
I’m sure the ABC had a choice; let us download the whole show but have it (somehow) stop working or erase itself after a given time period. Or stream away with ‘live’ playback. In the end they had to do something as BitTorrent was making entire shows available anyway.
I have tried iView and the video quality is just okay. Maybe it was my connection; it was better than (standard) YouTube but not even really VHS tape quality. It a bit blocky and seemed to use a low frame rate, so it the picture ‘jerked’. But hey, it’s version 1 and week 1. Give them time.