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Anecdotal evidence alert.

I live in the UK. On Sunday I wanted to watch the new Fargo TV show. I do not own a Television. I went to watch it 'live' on the Channel 4 website. It kept saying my broadband wasn't good enough. Odd. Googled a bit, ah - adblock is causing issues. This needs a new whitelist compared to 4od - fine by me. Sit through 2 minutes of adverts specifically over the web player (bearing in mind the channel I am waiting to watch also has ads - so by watching online I am apparently getting extra, thanks). Miss the first minute of the show but never mind - I was setting up last minute.

30 seconds into the stream, player dies and shows "insufficient bandwidth" again. Hit refresh. Starts new ad cycle over player.

Ctrl+W. Ctrl+T. "Eztv.it". Tab. "Fargo". Tab Enter Tab Tab Enter. Enter.

Within 4 minutes my "too slow" broadband had got the show at what seemed like better quality than the official web player. I also had no ads so I even finished watching the episode before terrestrial viewers despite starting late.

Content delivery still sucks. Maybe my tolerance is too low, but frankly maybe it's worth accommodating that and providing content in an easy and consistent fashion.

I was so impressed by Joss Whedon releasing his movie on vimeo (although I would prefer DLs over streams) that I bought it just to support it.




4OD is absolutely dreadful, and I've found that it doesn't work on Linux. Luckily, there's a 4OD YouTube channel where you can get the same content in a better (but still buggy, I assume Google wrote custom advertising code for them) player.

EDIT: Actually, they've gone and removed all that. Wonderful. I wish companies would license the BBC iPlayer technology.


I have to agree with you on 4OD. I've always had big issues when using it. Were your issues only with the live broadcast? Would you have been able to watch it on demand or would it have the same problems.




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