For those who don’t know, BT Vision is an digital television service provided by BT with no annual charges. As part of the service you get a “V-box”, which is essentially a computer running a version of Windows CE with a couple of DVB-T tuners in there to allow it to function as a PVR. It also connects to the internet and, through Microsoft’s service that they’re also going to implement on the Xbox 360, allows you to access a whole raft of on demand content.
Now, I’ve had this for a while – having decided to get it when I moved in due to it being cheap – and until last night I’d only really used it as a PVR. In this it works remarkably well, with a couple of niggles – mainly that sometimes the schedule isn’t up to date (as it gets that over the network rather than airwaves) and therefore it doesn’t adapt well to programs running a little late. I’ve also discovered that occasionally the clock gets a bit out of sync, and therefore I get the last few minutes of a show cut off. Other than these things it’s great and you can record up to two channels at once whilst watching something else that you’d already recorded (you can’t watch a third channel due to there only being a pair of DVB-T tuners).
Last night, however, I decided to investigate the on demand service. This provides a whole range of content from films (both provided by BT Vision and Film4 On Demand), to TV (BBC and Channel 4 providing a lot of content here), music and specialist know-how things (I discovered an entire section on pickles…) with prices varying from £0.79 for some TV up to £2.99 for a newly “released” film, with optional monthly subscriptions allowing you to watch an unlimited number of items from certain sections (depending upon the pack), although there isn’t one for Films. Once rented, you can watch the content an unlimited amount of times within the 24 hour period after playback starts, which is instantaneous due to it being streamed over your internet connection, and despite my connection not always being the best, it worked perfectly when I tried it out last night.
Of course, Microsoft also recently rolled out films to the Xbox 360 marketplace video store recently (in the UK at least, it’s been in the US for a while I believe). This also provides some on demand functionality, including HD versions of some films. This operates on much the same principle, only you download the film to the Xbox’s hard drive, and can start watching it any time within a 14 day period, with the same 24 hour limit after playback commences. The downloading to the hard drive, however, means that you can’t just select a film and go – and the selection is no where near as wide as that on BT Vision.
All in all, however, I think that on demand content like this is a great idea and certainly going to be used more in the future. Sure it might be more limited than going out and buying a DVD; but for one off situations where you just feel like watching something it’s great.