TV Times
As a result of these geographic restrictions the UK audience is left waiting, often months, for US shows to hit our shores. And even then some great stuff ends up on some obscure channel or relegated to the early hours of the morning, while the prime time slots are filled up with the latest reality (and I use the word in the broadest of sense) rubbish. Take Supernatural, a kind of grown up successor to the likes of Buffy and Angel, it’s a great show and highly entertaining, but it has been relegated to ITV 3 in the UK, so almost no one watches it. I recently recommended Supernatural to Hugo, and he became an instant fan - he said that he had never thought it was worth watching, since it was only shown on ITV 3!
Even worse are the instances of programmes that never even make it to the UK. Take Life as an example - a truly original and engaging police drama starring Damien Lewis that’s about to start its second series in the US, while the first is yet to see the light of day over here. Only last week I lent the first series of Life to Andy, and once again, he loved it - it’s just a shame that the only way to watch it in the UK is to buy the Region 1 DVD box set. Of course NBC has the whole first series of Life available to view on its website, but you guessed it, that content isn’t available to anyone outside of the US.
Sky has taken a slightly different route with its latest Sky Player - the less said about the original Sky Anytime player the better. As a Sky customer you’re entitled to watch much of what you have available on your TV, on your PC as well. The idea is sound enough, especially now that Sky has a player that actually works, but there is one major caveat - you can only watch the content on one PC, and that particular machine has to be the one that you used to sign up for the service.
I can understand Sky not wanting people to hand out their login details to their friends so they can watch stuff for free, but that could be addressed, to some extent at least, by allowing only one login session per account. Of course with Sky’s online service, you can also download content, so the need for a registered PC makes a case for itself there, but when streaming video, it would be good to be able to login and watch it from anywhere, using any hardware.
Added to all this are the monetised download services like iTunes and most recently Go!View, which works in partnership with Sky and allows for the download of TV and movie content to your Sony PSP. And then you have devices like the Slingbox that lets you watch your home TV content anywhere in the world, but although the ultimate delivery medium is the Internet, the actual content providers are still delivering their programmes via broadcast.
Of course there is the issue of quality - no Internet streaming service is going to give you the kind of picture quality that you’ll get watching Sky HD or Freesat HD. However, it’s also widely accepted that the vast majority of consumers are still watching standard definition TV signals for the most part, and often quite poor SD at that.
So, three years on, it seems that all the technology is in place to deliver our entertainment over the Internet, rather than through an aerial or satellite dish, but it still isn’t a reality. Unfortunately, my earlier fears that TV companies would not allow UK viewers to watch US content or vice versa have proved to be founded. I sincerely hope that TV companies will eventually wake up and start to service the global market, but just like the movie industry insists on cutting the world up into regions, the TV industry seems to want the same thing.
