Related Articles
If this Crave story is a little shorter than normal, that’s because we’ve got 18 episodes of The IT Crowd to watch, and then The Inbetweeners, Drop the Dead Donkey and The League of Gentlemen to keep us busy for the rest of the week. Yup, we’ve got access to new online streaming TV service SeeSaw, which has hundreds of hours of video from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five.
Content is mostly older shows, especially in the case of the BBC. The most recent episode of Doctor Who you can see, for example, is from 1989, and features Sylvester McCoy. Even Five seems to be keeping its newer material away, with the most recent Neighbours episode originally having aired in November last year. If you want to see newer stuff, it’s all on the Web sites of the respective broadcasters, so you won’t go without.
SeeSaw is, for the most part, advertising supported. In order to watch a TV programme you’ll have to sit through a couple of adverts at the start of each show, and a couple in the middle. The number of commercials seems to be bearably low, although there’s no guarantee this will remain the case forever. It’s also suggested that SeeSaw will offer pay-per-view content at some point in the future.
Using the service is very simple — there’s no software to download and everything we tried to watch worked first time. The quality is fine in a window, although it does fall apart slightly if you enlarge it to fill your monitor. Some videos appear to have different quality settings, which makes it better for people with higher-speed Internet.
Assuming all goes well with this restricted beta trial it’s likely that SeeSaw will launch properly in early March. If you’re interested in using the service, you can enter an email address at seesaw.com — you may be invited to join the beta, but if not you’ll still be informed when the final service starts.
