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From what I’ve read lately, I expected itv.com’s online video service to be a bit rubbish. I wasn’t prepared for it to be spectacularly bad. 

I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the Tour de France since it started on July 5th. Considering it’s the world’s biggest (and best - bike bias acknowledged) annual sporting event, TV coverage is woeful: a 1-hour slot on ITV 4 every evening. But - wait a second - how convenient! You can catch up online on itv.com!

Here are a couple of screen grabs that sum up my experience of watching the Tour on itv.com:

Great!

Just great.

Over the past week of viewing on a Mac (which is supported) in 2 different locations (thus ruling out bandwidth or bad internet connection as possible faults) I’ve encountered a grim catalogue of errors:

• player hangs or freezes during playback
• selected video doesn’t play on request (this is not about buffering, I know what buffering is)
• videos are ‘not available’ for some unexplained reason
• the selection of Tour videos goes from e.g. 7 (we’re currently on Stage 9) to 2, and now at time of writing, 3 - again with no explanation 

Not to mention incomprehensible error messages, bad player controls and navigation, and having to watch the same advertisement up to 8 times in an hour of playback. And what’s with Silverlight by the way? Having to download and install it before viewing is like some nightmare flashback to Real Player days.

The Tour de France videos must be among the most popular programmes on ITV Catch Up at present. If it was any good, this would be an effective way to promote this service to viewers who perhaps wouldn’t normally use it (from the looks of it most visitors are catching up on Corrie). But it isn’t any good, it’s awful.

Hey ITV! Spend some money and sort it out!

For anyone hunting for a decent way to watch Le Tour online, try www.letour.fr. Here’s a decent video service with daily short clips summarising the day’s action, albeit without Phil Liggett. This content is re-purposed by a number of other news sites (like this one, which plays back using Jeroen Wijering’s very excellent and now ubiquitous FLV Player).