FIXPlay still needs to Catch-up
Asleep at the wheel? Nine is proving too slow at adding TV shows to its new online Catch-Up service.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
The Nine Network launched its new online Catch-Up service FIXPlay on Monday promising a whiz-bang library of shows through its NineMSN portal -but it appears to be asleep at the driver’s wheel since then.
A number of titles announced as part of the launch are yet to be added to the platform.
They include Spooks, Torchwood, Day of the Triffids, Primeval and more.
More importantly, episodes that have aired on Nine this week for The Vampire Diaries, Fringe and Gossip Girl are yet to be added. Last night’s Getaway and Sea Patrol aren’t available either.
Nine needs to realise the basic principle of any Catch-Up service is that if you didn’t see the show on air, you can jump online and watch it legally. At the very least such shows should be added the next morning.
Earlier this week FIXPlay told TV Tonight, the titles issued at launch were those confirmed to run on FIXPlay but that content was continually being ingested into the system.
The question now is when?
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- Tagged with Day of the Triffids, Fringe, Getaway, Gossip Girl, Primeval, Sea Patrol, Spooks, The Vampire Diaries, Torchwood
25 Responses
Ps… im sooo sick of seeing the teddy bear ad every time you try to play something that doesnt work….
Fixplay is absolute rubbish… Nothing ive clicked on actually works, saying its unavailable… well why put it there??
Where’s Davids comment…looks like he may have shed some constructive light on this really poor service. Trying to catch up with Underbelly episodes 1 & 2…the audio seems ok but what’s with the audio being out-of-sync with the vision. Not to mention the vision not moving properly.
Bring back Hiro…that was Real catch-up TV viewing.
I would have thought the story and headline was comment in itself?
@craig
The way I see it, with internet connections progressivley getting faster and download limits getting larger, eventually the picture quality of these catchup services will get so good that when combined with a TV,STB or console with the ability to watch them, they could make the PVR obsolete.
Just tried to watch an ep of BBT, holy moly the quality is such crap!!!
That’s the end of FIXPlay for me…
Is sea patrol going to be on fix play? hope it is
Wow, very dissapointed. The show I was waiting for finally went up yesterday but it is one of the worst quality video’s I have ever seen. What happened to Hiro that channel 9 was using last year? I had absolutley no issues with it.
I will just record my shows from now on and not even bother with that garbage.
Oh and yes I have tried the service but with those file sizes it won’t even play on my 1.5Mbps connection. ABC’s iView only just plays at the best of times and it’s files are between 1/2 and 1/3 the size.
@Craig: not everyone has duel tuner recorders. I for one only have a single sd harddisk recorder and there are at least 2 instances where, due to the multi-channels, I have 2 shows on at the same time. Tuesday night there’s survivor and 24, both at 830pm, and Wednesday there’s lost, the pacific and now fringe, all @830. I’m not always around to watch one show live and record the other, so an online catch up tv service is vital to the maintenance of my viewership in certain shows.
Abc’s iView is sitll by far the best catch up service, it’s a pitty there’s nothing regular that I watch on it at the moment.
Chloe // Cindy
Yes terrible quality and huge file size
Very unattractive Nine ! You would think last in would have the best
Nine Management. Please read this and catch up to your peers
Hang on – this is nine we are talking about. Were you expecting customer service? Keep waiting folks – you might see your shows some time next year…
No comment…
Oh wait yes I have a comment. What I don’t get is why don’t people record shows they want to watch? I know sometimes you miss something or the recorder fails but really with service like this why even bother. By a decent PVR set it to record your shows and forget about wasting band width on this useless service.
I tried to watch V on FixPlay but the quality wasn’t that good even though it was 685mb. i think the quality of the the videos on ABC iVew are slightly better and use up less mb.
the commercial networks have a lot of work to do if they want to catch up to the ABC’s stupendously-good iView service
i like ten’s catch up tv service, much easier to use than anyone elses, esp 7’s which sucks major.
Why oh why did they decide to use Microsoft Silverlight? Its a terrible choice – at least until its more widely supported. Now I cant use fixplay on my PS3….. 🙁
thanks for pointing this out, David, I’d noticed this yesterday and thought it was a little odd.
I chose to record and watch other shows since FixPlay was announced expecting the latest episodes of the shows i missed to appear in the ‘library’ within a few hours of airing. Turns out i’m not the only one still waiting.
I must be gullible to believe Nine were seriously going to keep this updated. I feel ashamed.
Did Nine set this thing up expecting it to automatically update itself? This really emphasises Nine’s laziness, incompetence and stupidity.
I think they too focused on providing a wide variety of shows. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid, just provide the shows you air, like V, CSI, Survivors, Top Gear, The Big Band Theory, Survivor and all the other stuff.
I was watching an episode of BBT and the quality was really bad, kind of fuzzy and blurry and I couldn’t watch it. I’ve got no problems with the others (iView, Plus7), but FIXPlay kind of sucks.
David, thanks for the heads up. I just found out about it at TVFix and came here to find out more, ‘cos I know you’re always in the know 😉
Well done – the future of their very line of business lies in the success of such services, and yet just days later they’ve given up….
“whiz-ban library of shows” so… these are shows that are free of urine? (comedy typo)
When I try to play Balls of Steel it says I’m not in the supported country…