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YouView brings The Most Extraordinary Way To Watch TV (Part 1)

10/4/2013 6:17:59 PM

YouView takes the Freeview HD free-to-air terrestrial broadcast and adds on-demand and catch-up TV over the internet to it. The newest TV platform available in the UK, it’s completely designed from the ground up to use the internet. YouView is available from a number of manufacturers, with a choice of set-top boxes. We’ve used the Humax DTR-T1010 ($396 from www..com).

Interface and remote

As this system is designed to use the internet, the interface is very advanced, cleverly combining live TV and catch-up services in one view. It’s incredibly easy to use, too, with an easy-to-navigate EPG that displays a thumbnail view of what's currently on TV.

YouView takes the Freeview HD free-to-air terrestrial broadcast and adds on-demand and catch-up TV over the internet to it

YouView takes the Freeview HD free-to-air terrestrial broadcast and adds on-demand and catch-up TV over the internet to it

What’s clever is that as well as navigating forwards to set up recordings, you can step back in time, too. Provided that the content is available on one of the catch-up services (BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D and Demand Five are all supported), you can simply select it to view, as though it were a live program.

The show is then streamed through the relevant player over the internet. Catch-up is integrated throughout the system, not just the EPG. So, if you select a program that’s live or on in the future, YouView will show you other episodes available on demand. The same is true of search, which brings up on-demand and live programming alike

Program information is also pulled from the internet, which means that you get more information than is available on the standard Freeview EPG. As you’d expect, you can set standard TV programs to record. YouView supports both single episode and series recording so you’ll never have to miss an episode of your favorite show again. We particularly like the way that if you hit record on a standard-definition channel, YouView will check if there’s an HD version and ask if you want to record that instead.

BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five

BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five

Recordings are all managed via the MyView section of the interface giving you the option to filter by Watched and Not Watched, as well as sorting by Date or A-to-Z. It’s simple, but we’d have liked a bit more granularity, particularly when there are a lot of recordings. We like the way that recordings can also pull in extra information from the internet, so you’ll see still-image thumbnail previews of what you’ve recorded. Scheduled recordings are managed in a separate view, which makes it easy to see what you’ve got coming up and manage everything from one place.

Remote controls vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, although we have to say that we really like the responsive Humax version. It’s clearly laid out and has all the shortcut keys you’ll need. Of primary use is the YouView button, which takes you to the YouView menu. This lets you select the EPG, on-demand content and access the settings.

Live content

A decent range of Freeview channels are now available although as it’s all free it’s lacking compared to Sky or Virgin Medias services. In particular you get fewer HD channels (just BBC One and Two HD, ITV HD and 4 HD) and there’s no premium content, such as films or sports. Essentially, it comes down to what you want to watch If you mostly use the main terrestrial TV channels and aren’t into sport, YouView should cover most of what you want to watch.

Catch-up and on-demand

This is one area in which YouView excels. The platform provides catch-up services from all the main TV channels (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five). As we mentioned before, these are integrated into the main EPG. However, you can also access each on-demand platform individually. The quality varies, as each provider is in charge of its own player BBC iPlayer is excellent, for example, and the only one with an HD mode, whereas ITV Player has fewer features and makes it harder to find content.

Each on-demand service has its own player

Each on-demand service has its own player

A dedicated on-demand section lets you browse what’s available by category, including films and TV programs, collating content from all of YouView‘s providers In addition, the search facility is global, so you can find new programs and films using one consistent interface regardless of where they‘re actually stored, much like Virgin Media’s TiVo search function.

YouView was also designed to be extendable, so you can add new TV content which will be streamed over your broadband connection. Such services can either be available to all customers, such as Sky’s Now TV, or they can be locked to a specific internet service provider. There’s no reason why in the future YouView won’t have other services, such as Netflix or LoveFilm, or extend its catch-up services to other channels.

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