A couple of weeks ago, ABC’s iView VOD service celebrated its first birthday – they grow up so fast! David Knox at TV Tonight is reporting that to celebrate, the national broadcaster’s online video portal has begun a 3 month trial with Pipe Networks to allow smaller ISPs to offer unmetered access to the service.
At the moment, only Adam Internet, iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Westnet offer unmetered iView viewing, but this trial could potentially expand the audience massively. At the moment it’s Sydney only, but if successful, you could easily see it rolled out across the country.
As for iView itself – well, in June they averaged 158,000 visits a week, while they were offering 33 hours of catchup programming for adults and 2-3 hours for kids.
Considering those figures, it’s amazing that the commercial networks are still languishing so far behind the ABC in terms of VOD in Australia. No wonder bittorrent is booming…