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ITVN Drops Setanta On Demand Service

December 11th, 2006 By The Gaffer --> Comments

ITVN today announced it has dropped its Setanta On Demand service because Setanta doesn’t currently have rights to broadcast the programming on an ‘on demand’ basis.

“We are hoping to offer a video on demand service in the new season,” said Fabian Citraro, VP of Sales at ITVN.

The live Setanta programming is available as before. However, the dropping of the On Demand service will be a huge blow for football fans since the ITVN box doesn’t currently allow you to record programs (many of which are on during the daytime when football fans are at work).

It appears that Setanta’s current license agreement doesn’t give them permission to broadcast matches on an on-demand basis.

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Tags: ITVN

Viewing 3 Comments

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    This is terrible news. The on-demand service made ITVN very user friendly. I hope ITVN modifies its service so that they make recording possible. In the meantime, I'm going to start writing to my cable company again to pick up Setanta.
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    I'm keeping ITVN because my roommates love OnDemand with our cable company and therefore don't want DirectTV...this is a huge blow though. I really hope ITVN comes up with some solution for the recording issue...otherwise, I might just buy a dish just for Setanta...
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    • v
    What a terrible business decision. A fledgling service which has had all kinds of problems with reliability:
    (a) low bandwidth giving poor reception on all but the smallest TV sets

    (b) buffering unless you have a fairly high speed connection

    (c) server outages at the most poplar times for EPL games (Sat mid-morning)

    (d) servers down due to maintenance work being done during the day rather than through the night

    In all, ITVN is a terrific idea, but the execution is extremely patchy. To develop OnDemand without having secured the rights is just plainly foolish. Also, apart from occasional messages from their VP Sales, Fabian, in the ITVN forum, users are left to figure out for themselves when there are technical problems. At the very least they should indicate on their site when they are having problems. This may not be good for attracting new business, but at least they might stem the tide of current users abandoning them.

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