Broadcast on-demand apps are catching up in quality

Flaky television reception has seen my family switch from recording broadcasts to streaming catch-up, and we’re not in a rush to switch back.

Like many households, my family spends more time watching the likes of Netflix than we do tuning into free-to-air television. Partly because we can’t stomach the mind-numbing reality television which passes for entertainment, and partly because we can’t stand the excessive ad breaks.

You can’t skip the ads on catch-up, but the trade-off is the ads are nowhere near as bad.Credit: Getty

I’ll confess one of our few guilty pleasures is Lego Masters, a great reality TV show which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Even then, we never watch it live. Instead, our Fetch TV Mighty is scheduled to record it.

We sit down to watch each episode half an hour after it starts, pressing play to watch the beginning while it’s still recording the end; a time-bending trick known as ‘chasing playback’.

This way we can fly through the ads like a time lord and get back in sync with the live broadcast near the end. The downside is that you’re slightly behind everyone else who is watching, so you need to avoid spoilers on social media.

The trouble is we live in a valley and our television reception has always been temperamental. We made it through the first few episodes of Lego Masters this year with only minor glitches but, as the interference got worse, it was time for drastic measures.

We were already running a day behind for various reasons so, instead of watching the previous night’s recording, we switched across to watch Lego Masters on Nine’s catch-up app. (Nine is also the owner of this masthead.)

We sometimes watch Doctor Who on ABC iView, but we hadn’t bothered much with the commercial catch-up services. In the early days their picture quality was rather pixelated and shabby but, to be fair, they’ve come a long way. Today, you’d often struggle to pick the catch-up stream from the HD broadcast.

The bigger issue is when you’re watching catch-up there’s no way to fast-forward through the commercial breaks. But in practice, this wasn’t as painful as I’d feared.

The saviour is that catch-up has so few ads; roughly three every commercial break compared to at least seven in the live broadcast, not to mention station promos and all the other detritus.

As a result, a 90-minute show only runs for about 60 minutes on catch-up. Realistically, that’s about as long as it takes to watch a live broadcast on delay if you’re fast-forwarding the ads.

I have to admit that muting the handful of streaming ads — while people boil the kettle or go to the toilet — is a lot less stressful than fast-forwarding through the multitude of broadcast ads.

Being a lounge room time lord demands lightning reflexes. I start out conservative, at 4-speed fast-forward. As the onslaught of ads continues, I soon succumb to the temptation of 8-speed. Then the power goes to my head and I leap to 16-speed, but I inevitably overshoot the commercial break and am forced to do the slow rewind of shame.

The ads rush pas in a blur if you’re brave enough to engage warp 32-speed. At these breakneck speeds, when you press play the Fetch TV engages “backtrack” and jumps back a few seconds on the assumption you’ve overshot. Even then I still tend to misjudge it.

So as much as I love to fly through the ads like a couch-bound time lord, sometimes it’s easier to just sit back and enjoy the ride on catch-up.

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