The ABC is finally releasing an Android iview app in December. To coincide with this – or perhaps it’s the other way around – they shall also be relaunching the catch-up service with a new interface.
Richard Finlayson, ABC Director of Television said:
“We’re relaunching iview in December with a great new interface, and a long-awaited Android application as well. Early next year we will be releasing one of our major commissioning programmes for bingeing on iview and I think that’s exactly where a public broadcaster should be. We will continue to experiment in that space.”
Finlayson also announced that they are working on making the ABC archive accessible to everyone in the future. He anticipates that this service will be available around October of next year, and will have an accompanying app:
“One of the great frustrations people have is not being able to access episodes from a previous series. So we will make it easy, functional and effective.”
What do you think? Are you looking forward to an ABC iview app? Let us know in the comments!
aview is an amazing app which works when ABC wouldn’t!!
whats the bet the update will render Aview unusable ?
I would be if it included chromecast support. Otherwise not really. Of course the low bitrate they use kind of puts me off it a bit now.
Finally! Would be great to see Chromecast support in the future too.
That would be a great feature request to put forward to the devs
Considering how long it has taken for an Android iview app to appear I don’t see Chromecast support happening any time soon!
Excellent! Just waiting on the SBSonDemand App and I’ll be all sorted!
It has been out for agree. Check for it on Playstorr
I can’t find it! You sure?
Hi apologies for the late reply. Had issues logging into discuss on the PC to drop in a pic.
I downloaded sbs app about 8 weeks ago by chance. Now questioning whether it was Play store or side loaded. Check out the icon below for exact spelling etc.
Similar to iView in that it contains usually last 2 episodes per show.
second time lucky. grey / black icon white writing with yellow highlight
Yeah had it for over a month. Called SBS On Demand. Can send pic of app tray. Similar to a view with last 2 weeks of shows I watched.
Yes, but it is requires ICS, JB or KK. http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2013/10/sbs-on-demand-adds-first-android-app.html
Great! It’s pretty flakey through the PS3, so an android backup will be nice
All the 480 you can handle
Well, being an Android user, I just cant wait to be able to access iview. Thank you.
aview is working great right now, hope this won’t be a backwards step!
I fully expect aview and iView Nabber to be broken by this update. Breaking such useful user apps like those is something which coroprate copyright interests LOVE to see happen and actively ‘encourage’.
if thy release a native iView app for android doesn’t that kind of render aview irrelevant. Iview Napper might be a little bit more of a loss
It will depend on how the featureset of the official iView app compares with aview.
Jeni is right, if the functionality of the ABC app does not suit us it is nice to have an alternative that maybe does. Is it worth the effort however as from memory the developer said they only created the app because there was no official one thus there is no point to fix the problems with the existing one. Hopefully the developer will use it to learn and as a reference app for more work with other paying clients.
You don’t think they will just fix it ? I assume they are just using the web layout and linking to it so they update the app. A small downtime whilst they work on it I assume but they will probably do their best to support it nothing to do with copyright holders.
I wasn’t in any way saying that the devs of those 2 user unofficial apps would not try to defeat the official restrictions.
The 2 things I was saying were:
1. that the update would very likely break aview and iView Nabber.
2. that the copyright mobs LOVE, and actively ‘encourage’, apps like aview and iView Nabber being broken by updates to sites where their copyright enchained content is being hosted.
Jenny agreed. However as the ABC is a national broadcaster copyright protection is less of an issue for. Most O/S content is from BBCBBC so similar situation. However concern would not be zero
’bout time. but will it work? their existing app is pretty crap.