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iView becomes iNstant hit

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Within 24 hours of its official launch the ABC’s new online television platform iView is proving a big hit, with 130,000 views already.

ABC launched the original platform developed by ABC Innovation on Wednesday night.

It had 58,000 visits by midnight on Thursday, and 2.3 Terabytes of files transferred.

“This confirms our belief that Australians want quality content on a variety of platforms and the ability to watch this content at a time that suits them,” said the ABC’s Kim Dalton. “We are confident that they will appreciate the choice that ABC iView gives them”

Press Release:
Viewers around Australia have enthusiastically taken to ABC TV’s new internet TV service, with thousands trialling ABC iView in the 24 hours since it was unveiled to the public.

By midnight of Thursday 24 July, the iView homepage had recorded a total of 58,000 visits and 130,000 views. More than 2.3 Terabytes of files were transferred from the ABC secure server for the iView service.

ABC Director of Television, Kim Dalton, says the response to the new service has been wonderful. “This confirms our belief that Australians want quality content on a variety of platforms and the ability to watch this content at a time that suits them. We are confident that they will appreciate the choice that ABC iView gives them.”

ABC iView is a free internet broadcasting service that allows people to watch ABC TV programs on their computer –anytime, anywhere. It offers full-screen, high resolution pictures that are streamed over the internet. It gives viewers the ability to stop, pause, fast forward and rewind programs. ABC iView is designed to work on computers with a high speed broadband connection (ADSL2).

3 Responses

  1. The video quality is reasonable for the file sizes, although it does appear a bit pixelated (where most media players would try and blend the pixels together to appear more smooth rather than blocky, the iView player doesn’t seem to do this.)

    fangera, no one is complaining about the actual service, its just the delivery mechanism neonkitten was commenting on, which could be better.

    And I wouldn’t call this a free service, we’re all paying for it in the end, aren’t we 🙂

    The bottom line is everyone loves the new service, and the ABC is lightyears ahead of other Aussie networks.

  2. I got an Athlon Dual Core 64 bit and it runs it like it isn’t even trying.
    My Mem load half way through an episode is a mere 32mb. (out of 4 gig)
    Brilliant service!
    As much as people will TRY and find something wrong with it, all this for free I cant see why you would think there is something to improve.
    There’s no reason to need 720p quality when your just watching something you may have missed during the week. If you really want HD quality watch it on TV or wait until the DVD comes out.
    I just don’t understand people complaining about the quality of something they get for free! Grateful much! lol

  3. “Full screen, high resolution” is a teensy bit of a stretch, though it does look perfectly serviceable (and much better than the “vodcast” (oh how I hate that buzzword!) files the ABC normally provides at a similar file size.

    However I think the choice of a completely Flash-based interface is a bad move. It’s too CPU-intensive (it was way back when I was beta testing it and remains so at launch – it puts a heavy load on even a modern dual-core machine) and the Flash Video codec is inefficient – they should be getting much cleaner video quality at those file sizes.

    Just as well the ABC has possibly THE fastest web server and fattest internet pipe in the country, though, with those data statistics. Even with all that going on their sites never slowed down and were cheerfully transferring as fast as your connection could support.

    Speaking of which, I wish they’d stop banging on about an ADSL2 connection being needed, because it’s not. The data rates involved will stream effortlessly on an uncapped ADSL1 connection, and should be fine at “Telstra Broadband” 1500Kbit speeds as well. Anyone using a slower connection than that isn’t using broadband in the first place 😉

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