(Alternative title: My-quest-to-watch-Peep Show-as-soon-as possible- as-I-almost-certainly-miss-it-every-Friday).
Channel 4′s 4oD was down last Friday night at 11:30pm. This really isn’t that surprising it was just after the latest episode of Peep Show had aired, and I imagine thousands of people over the UK were wanting to watch it after getting home that evening.
Thankfully it was up again on Saturday morning and I downloaded the new episode without a hitch. Of course until I tried to watch it around 12pm, when quite possibly everyone else burned the night before were attempting to download the episode yet again.
Now this is where DRM (and bad design on the developer’s part) really bugs me: the video file was on my hard drive somewhere in some mystical format and location, but without being able to connect to the 4oD site, I couldn’t watch it. Madness. Surely it’s easy enough to change the service so you can watch downloads offline, but if this was a torrent download (or any regular download) then this offline business wouldn’t even be an issue.
In similar news, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming later this year, apparently.