In an ominous start to the Australian TV download scene the Nine network is offering this week’s episode of McLeod’s Daughters available for download for free. After that though it will cost $1.95 an episode and you won’t own the video, you’ll just have a license to watch it for five days.
It doesn’t work on a Mac (of course), and I’m still struggling to get it download on my Mum’s Compaq, instead of just letting you download the file they have this tortured flash interface which is still loading.
Several minutes later… It’s all loaded now and after downloading a “download manager” I’ve started to get my 460mb file of a show that hardly seems the most compelling program to launch a service with.
The SMH has reported that Nine apparently gazumped Seven who are also working on a download service, hopefully the Sunrise network will offer something a bit more useful though.
To give it a go yourself (as long as you don’t have a Mac) click here.
Why would anyone want to download a tv show made by NINE?
And that goes double for SEVEN?
They should invest their money in making some good shows first.
reply
From the idea they have in mind it is absud!
No wonder your Channel 9 and 7 is like our ITV!
However, the BBC is appartently doing a similar thing soon.
reply
Thats ridiculous, you pay your money and only have five days to watch, really and truely they should be allowd to do what they want.
reply
It’s quite pointless, although the show seems pretty popular. I’d pay for ABC shows if they expanded VOD (maybe iVods or VODcasting
) – The Chaser, for instance. But not this.
reply
Why the hell would you watch a video file in flash that you have a license to for 5 days? Who are 9 kidding? I sure as hell am not gonna buy something for 5 days… >_> Just Get the box set, sure, 50 bucks, but you can watch it as many times as ya like…
Or, use a VCR… >_>
reply
Oh dearie me – “Australian first”, they’re claiming? Well, it may be the first time that an Australian TV show has been offered as a paid rental DRM’ed download for PCs only. But if you’re going to give credit for the first Australian TV download, you’d be on much firmer ground giving the title to SBS’s podcast of Speaking in Tongues, which began in November 2005. And was free. And was in multi-platform MPEG4 format. And which you could keep and watch for as long as you wanted.
No biggie. Just giving credit where it’s due. (As it so happens, I pretty much carried that project, so it irks me to see Nine pretending it didn’t happen.)
reply