Somehow, despite the wonders of Freeview+, I managed to miss last week’s episode of The Inbetweeners, deservedly being hailed as one of the best UK sitcoms in years.
I wasn’t too put out as I’d read that 4oD, Channel 4’s catch up service had recently become Mac-friendly so on Friday I headed over to the site to watch the missed episode, I shouldn’t have bothered.
After viewing a couple of seconds of adverts I was greeted by a message telling me there’d been an error. I waited to see if the video would restart and when it didn’t tried refreshing the browser, when that failed to achieve anything I closed my browser, navigated back to the episode, tried again only to find myself greeted by the same error message.
I tried with another web connection on my Windows XP netbook with even less success, this time – and despite having the latest version of Flash installed – I didn’t get the couple of seconds of ads my Mac had managed to play.
I’m resigned to having missed the episode and TV’s never important enough to get too worked up about but if, as we’re endlessly told, the future of TV really is on the web someone needs to spend a little more time on the usability and a little less on the hype.
