I have been playing about with video on my iPod and have downloaded video from the iTunes Store including television shows and movies. It has been relatively simple and painfree (for me). So I was intrigued when I got an e-mail from Sony (or was it Sky) about the new GO!VIEW service for the PSP
I was interested less so in the free month’s trial, but more in the fact that season one of both Hustle and Spooks were available, as was some classic Doctor Who. They aren’t available (yet) on the iTunes store.
Now yes I could go out and buy the DVD box sets, but GO!VIEW looked really interesting as (yes a free month) and the Entertainment package was only £5 ($10) per month.
Now that struck me as much better value than the £1.89 ($4) per episode I have to pay at iTunes… and I know I get to “keep” the episodes at iTunes, but sometimes you don’t want to pay a huge amount to see an old series.
So was the process going to be as easy as iTunes was?
Well no it wasn’t.
Firstly you have to be running Windows, so there was no way I was going to do this on my Mac except through Parallels.
To be honest I should have kind of expected that especially as they were probably going to use some form of Windows Media DRM.
So went through Parallels and ensured that I could connect to my PSP through the USB port as the process did require you to do this.
So according to the website GO!VIEW is “so simple to use”, well let’s put that to the test!
I then tried to sign up and found I was required to download a GO!VIEW application, well I can’t complain about that if I download iTunes can I?
Once I downloaded I tried to get the free trial, but it would seem you have to subscribe first and then that gets you the free trial. You do need to give a credit or debit card however this is quite normal with any subscription service that I have seen.
Everytime though I filled in the registration data, it found an error and then “wiped” out a fair few of the fields, so after three attempts at pressing the submit button I was getting annoyed.
Eventually I was registered, so you can guess that I got even more annoyed when I clicked the download button for the episode I wanted to watch and I got an error message. Nothing about it in the FAQ or even in a Google search.
Hmm. One of the FAQs did mention Firewall issues, so I checked my Firewall settings in Windows and actually made it more restrictive, but this seemed to do the trick!
So now I could download.
Yay!
Well it’s slow so I haven’t yet managed to download an episode without impacting on my internet connection as GO!VIEW uses a peer-to-peer download manager based on the same Kontiki software that powers Channel 4’s 4oD and the BBC’s iPlayer download service.
Unlike those two services though, GO!VIEW programmes can only actually be watched once transferred to a PSP.
I’ll let you know how I get on.