{"id":17,"date":"2009-07-05T22:33:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-05T21:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2009-07-05T22:38:33","modified_gmt":"2009-07-05T21:38:33","slug":"watching-le-tour-on-itv-or-trying-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/07\/watching-le-tour-on-itv-or-trying-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching Le Tour on ITV. Or trying to."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a bit of an annual cycling fan &#8211; that is, I get really into the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.letour.fr\/us\/homepage_courseTDF.html\">Tour de France<\/a> every summer, and barely follow the sport at all the rest of the year. It&#8217;s a bit like only watching Tennis when Wimbledon&#8217;s on, or football when it&#8217;s the World Cup. Which, come to think of it, I do a bit too &#8211; but not as regularly.<\/p>\n<p>Now, part of this is because the Tour de France is the only professional cycling race that&#8217;s generally covered on &#8220;mainstream&#8221; TV &#8211; I&#8217;ve never had the &#8220;luxury&#8221; of Eurosport. A few years ago, even that was in doubt, with Channel 4 suddenly dumping the rights, and ITV rather half-heartedly taking them over. Which brings me to this year&#8217;s &#8220;good news, bad news&#8221; story.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><!--more--><strong>Good News: ITV4 has a daily 1-hour highlights programme<\/strong>. Which frankly is as much as I can take every day for 3 weeks. And they have the same great team I&#8217;ve been watching for over 15 years, including commentators Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett, who I recently discovered simultaneously cover it for the US channel <em>Versus<\/em>, dropping out of conversation to introduce completely different advert breaks and special features!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bad News: I live in Eastbourne.<\/strong> For those that don&#8217;t know, this means a digital switchover date of 2012, and only 4 (yes, that&#8217;s 4, folks!) channels without a satellite dish until then.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Good News: ITV4 is streamed live online.<\/strong> And I even have a set-up that allows me to watch that on my TV!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bad News: It&#8217;s on too early. <\/strong>The highlights programme is on every night at 19:00; the earliest I get home from work is 19:15.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Good News: It&#8217;s also available via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itv.com\/ITVPlayer\/\"><em>ITV Player<\/em><\/a> on-demand service!<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Bad News: The <em>ITV Player<\/em> is a heap of junk.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>The End.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OK, I&#8217;ll justify that statement a bit:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The 1st thing I was greeted with when I went to the site was a &#8220;pop-over&#8221; asking if I&#8217;d like to take a survey about the <em>Coronation Street<\/em> website. I checked; they really were asking everyone who clicked &#8220;ITV Player&#8221; what they thought of their <em>Corrie <\/em>microsite. Oops.<\/li>\n<li>The 2nd thing I was greeted with was a Flash advert pop-over that didn&#8217;t have a background or bounding box, and appeared partly in front of and partly behind the survey box.<\/li>\n<li>The navigation uses the most pointlessly non-standard controls I&#8217;ve ever seen, including a bizarre Flash-driven combo-box that takes 2 seconds to appear, and 2 microseconds to get bored of you and close while you&#8217;re scrolling through it. If you do manage to click on a programme title, you have to click a &#8220;Go&#8221; button next to it; because, you know, you might want to do something else; like <strong>run away from this monstrosity!<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Once you have found the programme you want, the Silverlight-based video player is not the best I&#8217;ve ever seen. To be fair, it&#8217;s a lot better than it was &#8211; it now has a proper seek bar, which marks advert breaks but only makes you watch one at a time, rather than the &#8220;skip to start of next advert break&#8221; the previous version featured. Oh, and it actually works in Firefox this time. But whose bright idea was the tiny volume control? And what is the &#8220;Unpin Controls&#8221; button <em>supposed<\/em> to do?<\/li>\n<li>Every now and then, one of the video files seems to go missing. Some poor shift-worker mistypes a filename or something, I don&#8217;t know. This would be kind of annoying if it meant that a programme was listed as available but wouldn&#8217;t play, but <em>ITV split their programmes at advert breaks<\/em>. So you start watching a 1-hour highlights programme, get to the &#8220;find out who won after the break&#8221;, <em>watch<\/em> the advert break, and&#8230; <strong>Nothing.<\/strong>\n<p>When this 1st happened to me, the service (then called &#8220;ITV Catch-up&#8221;) was fairly new, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt &#8211; &#8220;teething problems&#8221; and all that. But <em>it&#8217;s still happening.<\/em> It&#8217;s reassuring to know that <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.itv.com\/thread\/855097.aspx\">I&#8217;m not alone in my frustration<\/a> either. The current player sits there repeatedly trying to load the video until you stop it or skip to a section that exists, so I&#8217;ve been leaving it running in case someone notices some weird anomalies on their access logs.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Ah well, I guess it&#8217;s better than nothing. Most of the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a bit of an annual cycling fan &#8211; that is, I get really into the Tour de France every summer, and barely follow the sport at all the rest of the year. It&#8217;s a bit like only watching Tennis when Wimbledon&#8217;s on, or football when it&#8217;s the World Cup. Which, come to think of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,10,13,11,12,8],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-internet-tv","tag-itv","tag-rant","tag-sport","tag-tour-de-france","tag-tv","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}