At the beginning on 2007 there was almost no choice of legal, free or paid downloadable content in the UK.

Now in October 2007 we have 4 services.

Channel4 – On Demand, Sky Anytime, BBC iPlayer and iTunes.

I have all four loaded onto a Media PC and have used them all.

Here are my observations

Channel4 – On Demand

You can now have the last 30 days of content available to download and a considerable amount of that is free. Typically things like the American shows you would have to pay for but most of the home grown Channel4 content is free. A couple of nice examples are of the TV comedy shows Peep Show and Shameless you can download every episode for each of their 4 seasons for free.  So you can scour a back catalogue.

So with more and more free content, 4OD is looking pretty good.

Link: www.channel4.com/4OD

Sky Anytime

Sky are slowly catching on by offering free content, for example at the moment you can download every episode of the comedy show Weeds (both seasons for free). A few months ago they wanted 1.50 per episode. If you subscribe to the movie channels you have access to about 300 films to download at no additional cost.

The Sky Anytime software if the flakiest of the bunch, with regular “oops I have an error” popping up. So a mixed bag but useful in parts if you like their content.

Link: www.sky.com/anytime

BBC iPlayer

The BBC offer the last 7 days of original BBC content for free download. The downloads are sometimes slow. They have recently made some nice changes to the software and using the iPlayer is quite a nice experience. As all the content is free there is not much to complain about.

The service is currently in beta but the general public can apply.

One problem I have noticed is the CPU usage is high when the BBC iPlayer is downloading content in the background. So therefore if you are watching something whilst you downloaded something else it can cause the video to stutter. None of the other players have this issue. It does spoil the experience somewhat.

Check out this Screencast of the BBC iPlayer: First Look- BBC iPlayer

Link: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

iTunes

Expensive, no free content, Image quality is good. The model is pay to own unlike the other services. Cost of a Show is 1.89. iTunes is currently let down by a lack of content. The more choice they can offer and at a better price point and iTunes would be more interesting.

Link: www.apple.com/itunes

Summary

Things are moving very quickly in this market and I am sure more companies are going to get on board ITV for example. This is all still all very 1.0 with DRM issues, crappy software and companies still haven’t figured out how to moneytise it yet.

So long may they dish out free content, it works for me.