ITV and C4 On-demand come to PS3

For years, the Playstation 3 has wanted to be the hub of your living room experience - offering Blu Ray and DVD playback, web browsing, TV tuning and recording, and of course video gaming. More recently however, the proliferation of on-demand television has led to BBC iPlayer being available on games consoles, including the PS3 since 2009. This morning, ITV Player and 4 On Demand (4OD) also made an appearance on the console.

Access:
All three service are accessed through the cross-media bar (XMB) interface by scrolling to the TV section and then selecting the service you want. Each icon to a service is essentially a glorified link which opens up the web browser, meaning that these are not in fact apps native on the console itself. NB: Going to http://demand.five.tv allows you to access the Demand Five service, meaning that all five terrestrial channels now have PS3-accessible websites. Making these websites and not native apps means that they can be updated at any time and instantly to all users, without using up hard disk space.

Content:
The content for both 4OD and ITVPlayer appears to be the exact same content which is available on the desktop versions of the websites and there are adverts in between the breaks as expected. All three services has different User Interfaces meaning that users will still need to get accustomed to each until a standard emerges or until an aggregation service, like Seesaw, becomes available.

Quality:
The streaming itself is unfortunately not impressive, with only muddy Standard Definition content available, the High Definition-aficionados out there don't have much to crave. This is in comparison to the BBC offering HD streaming episodes of some shows on the PS3's BBC iPlayer service.

So, it is clear that both services still have some way to go, but the introduction of these last two services means that UK viewers can now get all terrestrial channel shows (with the exception of some US shows due to licensing issues) on demand via their PS3 and it's convinced me that that Freeview recorder box you were looking to purchase might not be needed after all.

Comments

  1. I have tried logging in to PS3 ITV Player with a Cambridgeshire Postcode and it just reports we have no record of postcode in our database

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