Saturday 26 July 2008

Aunty ABC presents iView with teething problems for consumers

So Aunty is giving Australia free internet streaming on six channels with iView.

Five of the channels are showing 'catch up' programmes, which is the spin for repeat programmes and the sixth appears to be an 'ad' channel for the ABC Shop.

iTWire tells us that
"iView uses a Flash-based player which may not be everyone's ideal, but at least it's available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The main menu page is a fairly hefty 2.3M (the bulk of that being the various XML files), and the episodes burn around 5M per minute. Clearly, this is not for people on 400M/month Internet plans. Oh, and the ABC recommends available bandwidth of at least 1.1Mbps for smooth playback. "

However, there is little to celebrate yet as so far only iiNet has reportedly agreed to place these ABC channels on the 'unmetered' download list.
Can anyone really see the Telstra board and CEO coming to the party?
Telstra has to be close to the biggest ISP based on broadband market share, so pigs might fly sooner.

As PC Authority puts it
"Telstra would rather you buy content from Bigpond Movies than watch iView for free, which is why it gives its customers such measly download limits but doesn't count data used downloading content from Bigpond. It's a de facto walled garden - you don't need walls when you cut people off at the knees so they don't have a high enough data allowance to go anywhere else. "

3 comments:

Doorman said...

Where can i buy "It's hard to be a cowboy with a poodle by your side" by Grant Luhrs

Help appreciated.

clarencegirl said...

Hi Doorman,

Grant hails from down south now and these are the only contact details I know of:

THE TABBITA RECORD COMPANY
PO Box 1450
Wagga Wagga NSW 2650 luhrs@exemail.com.au
02 6921 5618

ACMEC DISTRIBUTORS
PO Box 393
Erindale ACT 2903 info@acmecrecords.com
02 62924550

Hope this helps.
There is a companion song to the one you're after called " It's hard to be a POODLE with a cowboy by your side".

Doorman said...

Many thanks Clarencegirl for the info.