A new online TV service called SeeSaw was launched with over 3,000 hours of shows available to watch for free.
SeeSaw hosts shows from most of the major UK TV channels. You can watch recent shows from Channel 4 and Five such as Skins and Hollyoaks as well as archive content from the BBC, including previous series of Hustle, That Mitchell and Webb look.
The service is free to use and is supported by advertising, with one minute ad-breaks before and half way through programmes. As SeeSaw does video-on-demand instead of live broadcasts, you don’t need a TV license to use it.
SeeSaw was announced in November 2009 and released for a public beta on Wednesday. We’ve been using the service since it went in to private beta-testing in January and have been impressed by it so far.
The website is very easy to use to find shows by category and TV channel, and it takes only a few clicks to start watching. As the video starts to play, the rest of the website fades in to darkness, not to distract you from the video.
On SeeSaw, it takes about as much bandwidth to watch a show as it does on BBC’s iPlayer, with most shows having low, medium and high quality options to choose from. No HD streaming for now though.
The range of content available is quite good; however it’s a bit disappointing that some shows, particularly the BBC ones, are a bit old, but there’s still enough to keep you busy for now.
As well as the lack of new content, there are also occasional problems with the video streaming as it can sometimes stop working.
The company behind the website, Arqiva, have been improving the content throughout the trial period and plan on adding more shows and are also working on deals with US TV channels. If they can continue to add more content regularly and fix a few bugs, it could become a highly useful website for watching TV online.
SeeSaw’s biggest strength is to bring all the shows from different channels in to one website making it a great way of finding new things to watch – legally and without you having to pay for anything.
A really interesting service, it’s a shame about the lack of HD streaming since the rise in high speed Internet means this kind of service is more readily available.