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No sign of Freeview’s catch-up service yet

Freeview still hasn't launched its catch-up service, blaming external factors including the NBN.

In 2009 Freeview chairman Kim Dalton spoke about networks joining forces to create an on-demand streaming video service to TV screens in an effort to tackle serious threats to their audience base.

“The next big challenge confronting the ABC and the free-to-air television platform is to deliver a television streaming experience online and on-demand to the TV in the lounge room, and I think we will do that,” he told The Age.

“Certainly the ABC will do that in the next 12 to 18 months and there is every opportunity for the free-to-air platform to do that together, to do it as a whole and do it as a branded offering as part of Freeview. That is a real possibility, and if we do that it will be the next major chapter in free-to-air TV.”

But this week Freeview CEO Robin Parkes has said plans for an industry-wide catch-up TV service involving would not launch this year.

“It’s absolutely not dead,” she told AdNews. “But it’s not just about the networks getting together. There are so many external factors – unmetered downloads, the NBN and so-on. I expect it won’t be this year.”

She also denied speculation that Freeview’s marketing budget would be cut, saying the total budget would stay the same for the next year.

“Awareness [for Freeview] is at 93%,” she said. “We don’t need awareness – we’ve ticked all those boxes. We won’t be doing the big bang Freeview brand message. There will be more targeted messages and we will be concentrating more in technology developments such as the EPG [electronic program guide].”

11 Responses

  1. @ Jason D – no bandwidth is available for additional channels at the moment, whether for timeshift or new content.

    I think most people would prefer see new bandwidth allocated to HD on all channels first, and then look at allocating additional spectrum to new channels.

  2. What about running timeshifted digital channels like they do in the UK for free-to-air TV, just like Foxtel’s timeshifted channels.

  3. So far the only difference between Digital TV and “FreeView” is an EPG that my tuner doesn’t support.
    This would actually be a good feature, but instead FreeView will remain a marketing ploy for Australian TV. In fact, it actually only takes away features (e.g. PS3 PlayTV).

    Not happy.

  4. Frankly, Freeview has been mostly p!ss and wind, and has muddied the waters about digital television for the average person in the street. 93% of people might be “aware” of Freeview (have seen the word somewhere) but I’m betting not many of them know what it is that they do.

    They have confused people right from the start with their rip-off ad exclaiming 15 new channels when we already had 6 of them. Don’t get me started on their EPG, branding of crippled hardware, or pie-in-the-sky internet TV. It’s little wonder that Parkes is flying the coop.

    The ABC has embarrassed all the other networks with iView. Just give all the money to them and have them build a content distribution site for everyone. It’s the only way that you’ll avoid a dog’s breakfast that hardly anyone will use.

  5. Hulu has been considering launching their service itself here with many rumors over the past few months, but their CEO, Jason Kilar told me via email that “We don’t have anything to share on Australia”.

    I wonder what a Freeview offered service may look like.

  6. I have a Hulu plus subscription running across a VPN tunnel and streaming SD across my ADSL 2 connection that gives me a whopping speed of 6Mb due to my distance from the exchange. All this is done from the Hulu App available for Samsung TV’s and I can even stream HD about 40% of the time with no issues. If I can do this over a VPN on a 6Mb connection with download limits in place then surely Freeview can get there act together and launch a service.

    It probably comes down the the FTA networks not wanting to do it because there is no money in it for them!

  7. @Al – when Freeview EPG was being launched, I contacted Freeview through the form to ask which model TVs were or were soon to support this EPG, as I was in the market for a TV.

    No response. Five months later sent again. No response.

    Very poor communication.

  8. They’re still talking about the EPG… yet how many PVR’s out there work with the new Freeview EPG? Well I just checked the Freeview website and there are only 3. Yes after all this time talking up the Freeview EPG there are still only 3 PVR’s on the market.

    Well I suppose 3 is better than none. All I want is a product that will record a TV show at the click of a button. Our TV networks seem to be the worst in the world for broadcasting a programme at the advertised time!

  9. So they lied (big shock) ABC has a great service but the others, including Austar are no were near as good. Plus for those of us using older hardware or not on faster ADSL it’s all but useless.

    A service like this needs to be easy to use, not count on you monthly data, the shows need to be available longer (not just a few weeks) and most important it needs to be free. Maybe if they wanted to make some money and had a service up and running it could be free for all shows for say a month, then if you still wanted to see them have a low monthly fee or one off charge to still access the shows you want online?

    It’s almost like they still don’t realize there are free (if not totally legal) services that have been around for years?

  10. A single catchup TV service for all the commercial channels (or all FTA channels inc ABC and SBS) would be fantastic.

    Right now, the services are all over the place. Some channels offer a single place for all network shows – others have different pages for each digital channel. Only one has a good iPad app (iView) that can easily stream to watch on TV.

    If Freeview could launch a local equivalent of Hulu from the US here, that would be impressive. I’m not sure they’d have the budget to make it work really well, and on many devices though.

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