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.

So I checked out the on-demand service yesterday after Angela had missed last night’s episode. I remember how easy it was catching up on Extras series two last year: just go to the BBC Two Extras site and click on ‘view latest episode’. Very easy.

Peep Show wasn’t quite that easy.

After having to run a Windows Update (which I do regularly anyway) and download some dubious looking DRM add-on for Windows Media Player, AND the latest .NET framework, I was then able to install the 4oD client (oh, after a reboot or two). After another step (signing up) I was able to download the episode. Finally.

To be fair the 4oD service looks quite promising: TV on demand as well as movies, but I’m really not sure about the whole process it takes to get it running. Sure it’s in its infancy, but the experience here really wasn’t particularly good. I’d tolerate a small install on my PC (emphasis on PC here: 4oD is purely Windows Media Player/IE-centric), but why is this service so desktop-focused? Back to the BBC example: I’m only ever a few clicks away from viewing a new episode of a new show. Sure 4oD does have some features to make up for the heavy install factor, such as download management and being able to ‘download for later’, but it’s simply so far away from the ‘seamless’ exercise I and many others have become used too with the likes of YouTube and Bittorrent.

But at the same time, I think it’s great Channel 4 has set this service up. They’re miles ahead of ITV and Five (who don’t appear to have any type of on demand service) and also the BBC when you consider the breadth of their offering: 4oD gives you access to the last weeks entire broadcast program for free. It will be interesting to compare 4oD to the BBC when they finally launch a service like this of their own, which will hopefully be far more platform independent.