After drawing Boxee’s attention to the ABC iView 84% loading issue in November last year, iView was removed. This meant Australian Boxee Box owners lost Australian content until the issue was fixed. Well today that issue has been resolved and ABC iView content has once again returned to the little box that could.
There’s 149 shows on offer, ranging from the popular well known shows like Catalyst, Good Game, Doctor Who and even children’s programs like Thomas the tank engine. Each show contains multiple episodes, but in just how many episodes lies the problem. Content is very slim, with most shows offering a few episodes, sometimes as low as 2, many of which are also old back catalogue. This is very disappointing and I’d look to the ABC to explain why, obviously Boxee would love to have as much content as possible and the most recent content at that, which can only mean the rights holders are getting in the way.. again.
One gem in the addition of an ABC News 24 live stream in both medium and high quality, but unfortunately their definition of ‘high quality’ is not the same as mine. In fact the quality of the programs is on SD, meaning you’ll need to shift that couch back so the content on your super-expensive HDTV actually looks passable. This is clearly ABC iView’s stream quality, not a fault of Boxee’s, you can only do what you can with what your given.
One frustration you’ll experience when viewing ABC iView content on the Boxee Box is that after making your selection, you’ll have to wait for it to load, then click again to actually watch the program. In all other videos on Boxee this happens automatically with Boxee doing the hard lifting (maximize scraping) for you. Why the cursor isn’t hidden automatically is beyond me.
So its there people, go watch it if you have a Boxee Box, but this implementation is certainly not something that you should buy it for.
