Review: Television

Score:
68%

Author: Makayama

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Makayama's newly released media application for S60 phones, Television, has a clear association in the mind of the user, given its name. If they were being strictly honest, then “TV On Demand” would have been a more accurate title, but whatever the name, this is a quick and easy solution to watching video content on your phone.

While there are other ways to watch video, for example browsing via the YouTube app, using the Real Player client built into the handset, or directly browsing to a video-enabled website, Makayama promise to make it a lot easier to get to and watch pre-recorded content on your phone.

Opening up the app, you are presented with a wall of TV stations – rather disappointingly, this is in fact the splash screen, and not some fantasy UI. Once the data is loaded, you get a familiar list of channels; and it's pretty impressive. Sky, Reuters and Al Jazeera English are all on the first page, and scrolling down you find other channels such as CNN, Cnet and Associated Press in the news stations, and more entertainment channels like HBO, Sesame Street, G4tv and ESPN are included as well.

Click through these and you get a list of clips from each station... and it's then that you realise that this isn't live TV, but the highlight videos and recaps already available through the web sites of the stations. It works pretty well though, allowing you to get just the clips you like without having to navigate through a full web site on the phone's browser. It's all laid out neatly, in order, and with a consistent interface.

Arguably, this is nothing more than a glorified video podcasting application that has two significant flaws. Firstly, that you are stuck with the list of channels that you have to watch and you are forced to stream the shows – there's no saving them on your memory card (as you would with a podcast) for later viewing. The second is that you only get the channels listed; there's no way to add your own favourites from third parties.

Honestly, my first thoughts were that this was a mistake, but on reflection I think this misses the point of Television. It's meant to be a simple idea, you pick up your phone, choose a channel, and then choose a programme to watch – and watch it there and then. No fuss, no setup, no playing around with dialogs or save boxes. You're taken as fast as possible from opening the app to watching the video. That's the important point and that seems to be here on which Makayama have focused their development efforts.

It also means that Makayama can make sure the videos play back on your device – I wonder if they are doing some automatic transcoding themselves to bring down the file size and guarantee that everything plays, or if they are doing some work on the fly to help the video flow?

This Television app has been around for some time on other platforms, but this is the first time on Symbian, and there are a few rough edges to the application. It's understandable that there is buffering in the video playback, and when viewing over a 3G connection there can be a noticeable wait for the content to fill the buffer. But if the buffer empties in the middle of a phrase or sentence, I like to rewind a bit and get the full flow. That's not possible on Television, as there are no playback controls on the video; neither do the volume controls work once you are into viewing the video.

I'd hope that some user control over video playback will be added in subsequent versions.

While watching video, it's obvious that there is a lot of compression going on to lessen the amount of bandwidth used. While not high quality, the resulting video is more than watchable on a small screened mobile device, and thankfully there are not too many artefacts in the audio portion of the video. Given the focus on news and current affairs in the channel list, this is a good trade-off, in my opinion.

There are some problems with the channel list and linked videos – clicking on a Sesame Street video of Kermit the Frog singing “Our Town” should actually bring up that video, not a winner's speech from this year's Mashable awards. It could well be some ratty data, but if one of the benefits is clear labelling and appropriate channels, getting Sesame Street wrong is right up there with thinking that there's no space in the UK TV market for a fourth channel [Ewan's retro media reference for the day - Ed].

There's also a bit of a delay in getting the latest videos into the system. I'm sitting here on Tuesday morning and the last Sky News report is for 5pm on Monday night. If this is going to be an effective way to catch the news then there needs to be a faster turnaround of the content.

All told, Television has made a good first step into the Symbian world. It's a solid and dependable application. Though it does have a few areas where it needs to be banged into shape, these aren't enough to stop it being a useful and easy to use media application on your smartphone.

-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2010.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 10:10 UTC, February 2nd 2010