A Portal for Tele’s?
Telesausage (soon to renamed “Nelle the TeLe”) have finally finished rolling out their Teleport service. Which is true-video on demand, or IPTV, whichever you want to call it. It’s fair to say it’s taken a long time, as seen as true-video on demand was trumpeted as the advantage cable has over satellite since it was first rolled out in this country over 10 years ago. Any why is south yorkshire always the last to get software updates? Anypoop, its pretty good, when you select a show it only takes 4 or 5 seconds to begin playing (I was expecting it to spend aaages pre-buffering) and the fast-forward/rewind is impressive as they pretty much kick in straight away, although it only seems forward at about 4 or 5x.
Film wise the catalogue is exhaustive, with a lot more movies than front-row/sky movies have at any one time. But the TV shows on offer are less useful, I expect this will improve. There are some complete seasons (select a show, and then select an episode) but the list is a bit lacking, there wasn’t anything I personally would watch. The catch-up what you missed on Tv last week, type section is problematic in that they only have BBC channels, with a few flextech (bravo, living) channels thrown in). It also seems to take 3 days for shows to find their way into the list after their initial air-date. So at the moment teleport cannot match a PVR kit, but it will probably get closer with time.
Negatives, the picture quality is noticeably worse than live tv, I wouldn’t mind knowing what the bit-rate is. It would be better if the STB’s were a bit more modern so that they could use a recent format such as MPEG4. MPEG2 (which i’m sure it will be using) isn’t really idea for streaming bit-rates. But hey, it certainly is watch-able, its only the fast moving scenes that it gets a bit muddy. It’s the STB that causes the other problem too, telewest’s standard STB’s are cranky and slow in the GUI department, navigating around menus is painful, and a service like teleport requires quite a lot of nested menu’s so progress is slow.
