4 Oh Dear

Any companies that want to take on iTunes and the use of DRM for purchase of legal video downloads will need to perform well to be in a with a chance. Unfortunately for Channel 4, there is no chance of it's online TV service coming close to threatening even the most unreliable of services since it is, probably, the most unreliable of services.



For example, the only TV show I can imagine myself watching on the channel is The IT Crowd. When it first started being made available on 4oD, I couldn't get the video to play inside the 4oD player, so I had to find the video file on my Hard Drive and play it from there straight into Windows Media Player.

Unfortunately, Channel 4 have stopped me from doing that and now force me to do it from the web page itself. So, I load up the software and after some coaxing (which involves downloading the video then starting up a streaming video only to have to copy the URL to the stream and paste that into Windows Media Player), it plays and I get to have my weekly TV giggle.

That was last week. This week, I'm playing it in the web based player and it says "Oh no! You naughty little man! You need to be playing this in the web based player!". I am. It's wrong. I'm right. I don't get to watch my video.

I'm still unable to watch it. It's free, so all it's really cost me is the time it takes to connect, download and try to kick it off.

But if I had to compare that with the smooth runnings of the iTunes experience, it should be clear to everyone except a Channel 4 executive that 4oD is utterly useless.

When it comes to iTunes, I just pick my Song/Video/Movie/TV Show and play it. I'm fully legal and yet the whole DRM issue doesn't show its head at all. It's transparent. Sure, I'd rather it wasn't there at all, but it's Ok because it causes me no trouble whatsoever whereas this Microsoft-based DRM means that I can't run it on my preferred platform (Mac OS X) and even under Windows, it won't run because it isn't sure of what software I'm using to run it.

Like, hello?