BBC iPlayer alternatives rated

By Ian Morris on 22 May 2009, 3:27pm

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Demand Five

Demand Five has a great deal of potential -- not least because it offers a decent amount of premium US content in the form of NCIS, CSI and The Mentalist. If you like the sort of thing on Five, then it goes without saying, you'll love its online catch-up service.

The service has some nice features. For example, registered users can rate shows. It also tells you the amount of data you’re going to transfer -- which is especially handy if you are on a capped broadband service and need to monitor what you download. Our tests also show that the video window is around 567 x 319 pixels, the largest of the commercial on-demand services. Only iPlayer beats it on size, and of course, the BBC does HD, which slaughters everything else available.

To our eyes, the Demand Five video was the softest we’d seen. It’s not bad in a window – but full screen it can look a little blurred. That said, we still think it’s probably a tie between Five and Four for the best quality, with ITV lagging.

Like 4oD, leaving the player on pause for any significant amount of time will result in the player refusing to resume your video. The BBC has got this down now, where even if you accidentally close the browser window, you can resume from where you left off.

We also liked the fact that you can optionally buy older episodes of TV shows. For example, most things are free for 30 days after they air, but if you want to watch older shows, you can rent them for 99p. If you buy, you have 14 days to watch the show and can view it an unlimited number of times in a 48 hour period before it expires.