I’ve just noticed that a small milestone has been passed in our household. That is, that for most “public service” TV content, we now have three ways of watching it “on demand”. We are in the UK and so public service content comes from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5.

We can now watch recorded programmes on the BSkyB Sky+ PVR (satellite), we can watch the Virgin Media “On Demand” VOD service (cable) or we can stream video from the broadcasters’ websites over the Internet. The BBC, in particular, has quite advanced solutions for cable and the internet, branded as “iPlayer”. The other broadcasters are not far behind, but iPlayer is more comprehensive and consistent to use.

The BBC is interesting to watch as it shows what is technically possible. (The BBC has a mission to provide content to licence fee payers and is funded by the licence fee, so they don’t have to worry about getting revenue from a new service.) It’s clearly getting very easy to package and move content around, but is it commercially sustainable? I have been following the saga of ITV in the UK, who are funded almost entirely by advertising and they are seeing a steady decline in that revenue as advertising spend moves to the Internet and PVR’s undermine TV ad spots.

So how do the three platforms measure up?

On an Standard Definition TV, I usually can’t tell the difference between the Sky+ PVR and Virgin Media on demand. I have seen a few MPEG artefacts on the Virgin Media on demand service, but that might have been because I was looking for them! Over the internet (as you would expect) the picture resolution is noticeably lower and the frame rate also appears to be lower (giving a jerky picture, especially on slow panning shots.)

How about navigation? The most obvious point is that a PVR has to be programmed before the show is broadcast, although series linking mitigates this. (Some people would say that PVR isn’t really “on demand”, although it does give a similar user experience.) I have to say that the time/channel grid is still a very intuitive way of finding a show that I want to watch, but that might be because I am old fashioned

The navigation of a VOD catalogue on a TV does have a fundamental navigation problem as catalogues are large and TV screens are small. The early versions of the Virgin Media (then NTL) VOD were very cumbersome and slow to navigate, but Virgin and their VOD/middleware supplier SeaChange, have made many improvements and it is now quite usable. In particular the BBC iPlayer application, which is overlaid on the SeaChange platform, is very easy to navigate and even has a free text search option. It is still not a quick and simple as a Sky+ PVR, but that’s because it is giving access to a much bigger library of content.

Navigation on a PC is better that the two TV based alternatives, but it would be, wouldn’t it? There’s more screen space and the computer has more processing power to keep the GUI running quickly. Of, course, we get into the “lean forwards / lean back” debate i.e. computers are for working on and TV’s are for relaxing. Again, I might have an old fashioned view on this. Once I have done the hard work of finding the content, I always find that my children are happy to relax and watch the content on a computer