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The ABC has been teasing its viewers lately with the tagline “TV out of the box”. Well, this evening the ABC announced that its BBC iPlayer-esque service initally dubbed ABC Playback is now open to the public, and has been rebranded as ABC iView.
The BBC have been very succesful in establishing iPlayer as a brand despite its ordinary name, but really, iView was the best they could come up with?
Anyway, derivative name aside, the just launched ABC iView service is fairly similar to the beta version of the ABC Playback service that I reviewed earlier this year. And while the video quality is fine, and the content has increased to include news among other things, the interface still bugs me badly, and the whole thing doesn’t come close to the user experience of the newly launched BBC iPlayer 2.0.
They’ve quite poorly tried to reinvent the wheel in designing it, which is a pity because the content is fantastic and the quality’s not too bad either.
iinet users are even lucky enough to have it available download-free:
http://www.iinet.net.au/my/media/abc/
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iView is horrible and slow to navigate through. They should try and licence the iPlayer technology.
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