To my surprise today I found the movie 'Point Break' on the i-player. Surprise, because you can't watch the football on the iplayer because of rights issues.
I stand slightly corrected, because you can watch Newcastle v Ipswich on there. (I'm sure Roy Keane is getting every penny of his license fee value watching that!)
For the sake of accuracy then; you can't watch Premiership Football on the iplayer.
(Note to self: Ctrl-Z brings about unwanted results in the Google editor)
Once again, from the top...
On ITVs online offering , the snappily titled, itvplayer, for instance I cannot watch the third season of Supernatural because of the rights issue. They have now chosen to show at 3am in the morning. I don't own a PVR
, still providing house-space to a geriatric video recorder. We missed an opportunity to pick up a cheap PVR when they were clearing the Setanta-branded boxes and haven't really been motivated since.I'm waffling. It's an insecurity born from not posessing cutting edge consumer electronics.
I don't 'tape' Supernatural at 3am from ITV3. If I could watch it on the itvplayer I surely would. Crap as I find ITV mostly these days, they're not alone.
A few years late, I discovered the end of an episode of The Wire on BBC2 (I think) late one evening. Trotted along to the iplayer - no joy.
Channel 5 have recently started a new series. FlashForward. Same rules. Big feature, no re-run on the web. I dare say that if I went lookign I could probably find a torrent though.
As you can't access the video download streaming sites from outside of the the hosting country (I've not even had success using proxies to get Hulu and ABC for instance) I don't see the problem here. To my mind the producers are losing out not sellign the online rights to the purchasing network at the same time as the TV broadcast rights. Seems like they are clinging to an old model.
I'm listening to Young Lion's Dance Hall M1X on the iplayer. The thing is I was in the mood for some reggae. I searched for 'reggae' on the iPlayer.
My BBC came up somewhat short. I was offered a coolection of shows, with a mention of The Upsetters on Don Letts' Radio 6 show as the only proper hit. Several Dance Hall shows, but no other reggae to be found.
Quickly back to Point Break. I watched it (again) last night. I wasn't about to watch it again (again) onthe iplayer, in addition ot me watching 'on air' until gone midnight last night, when I own the DVD. It struck me jus thow bad some of Keanu Reeve's acting really was. Most noticeably in his one-to-one scenes with Swayze. It was Ted Logan at his wooden best. Still love that movie though.
The government seems to keep hitting the BBC over the head about their commercial activities. I don't confess to know the real ins and outs of it, but if it saves the licesnse fee going up, it suits me. Conversely it doesn't justify paying Wossy £18m either. It's not as if he could defect anywhere else and get a better deal.
It strikes me though, that in the iPlayer (and their content naturally), the BBC have a killer app with killer content. Why not monetize it? They've done all of the hard development work. It would be easy to add a second strand with a subscription model for 'the rest of the world'.
I've tried internetradio365. I wasn't about to pay for a service that was awful for free.
I read an article in The Guardian bigging up Spotify for the iPhone. I thought to myself, 'maybe a tenner a month for somone prepared to fork out the best part of £40 a month for an iPhone might make sense to them' but to me, £50 for a phone that plays music - music you can't even keep - is certainly not my idea of value.
I read The Guardian, more than any other paper and it's the only newspaper site I read. That article made be think of it as a yuppy club. One that caters to people who spend in excess of £50 a month on their phones - even if they do share the Spottify subscription.
Away from capitallist excess, they are saying on the news that we could see a 4 degree rise in temperature by the middle of the century. On the basis of the oil running out (£1.04 per litre - remeber the complaints when it went above a pound - all quiet not though) I shouldn't think it will make much difference beyond hastening the demise of the species.
Perhaps Swine Flu is just the start.
Welcome to the disappointment.
