4oD - Channel 4 On Demand

12:21.34 - Sunday 15th April 2007   (Link to This Entry)

4oD is the latest initiative from the UK's Channel 4, and features Video on Demand from the organisations film and TV listings. Almost anything from Channel 4 and FilmFour is available to download and play on either a free 'catch up' or a rental basis.

Not having a Windows XP machine, it took the arrival of the new laptop to allow me to sample the delights of 4oD. The service interface is an XP-only download (though XP Tablet Edition works just as well, as should MCE) and appears to make heavy use of Flash and WMP DRM. The interface is clean and uncluttered, and resembled the 4oD/Channel Four websites.

Both TV Shows and Movies are divided into your usual categories of Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Documentary and so on. TV can be downloaded on a 'Catch Up' basis to allow you to watch things you've missed in the past week, or on a 'Book It' basis so you can set your machine to download a show once it becomes available. There's a mix of Free and Pay offerings that pretty much covers the whole of Channel 4's output.

Movies are Pay Only items with prices around £1.99. Presumably if the service takes off, newer films (EG, new FIlmFour releases) may be made available at a higher cost. Currently the most recent films available are from 2002 (Thunderpants, Miranda and Talk to Her) but hopefully this will be improved. There are a few classics, so it's a decent start.

The actual 4oD software runs in your system tray at all times and will download your selections in the background, or you can watch them streaming if you prefer. Speeds are good - certainly it appeared to be able to max out my 10Mb connection with a 176MB (24mins) download of 'Derren Brown: Trick or Treat' completing in just a few minutes. The estimimated download time was 48 minutes, but the actual time was nearer 5-10. Obviously, network conditions and your broadband speed will affect this. Most programmes are 24 or 48 minutes long - indicating they're free of ads.

Video quality isn't bad on the TV shows we've tried. The stream appears to be 320x240 but the software does a good job of scaling it up to whatever resolution you happen to be using. On the 1024x600 notebook, things were perfectly watchable. The play allows double-size and full screen modes, and the application's control panel is very professionally rendered.

Maybe it was just us, but we were unable to simply drag the slider to a random position on the video progress bar and watch the stream from there. Rewind and Fast Forward seem to work as indicated, however. Once you've started watching a download you have 48 hours to finish watching, then it's automatically deleted from your list.

On the whole, the service works very well. It's intuitive and speedy, and the bare minimum usage - that of being able to download free stuff from earlier in the week - makes the service very useful indeed. It would be nice to have all UK channels served up in this way - perhaps the BBC et al should take note?