ITV Player Can't Cope With Emmy-Winning Show's Demand

[Rachel_Sandford]

The first episode of the second series of Downton Abbey premiered Sunday evening on ITV1. Figures have shown that it was watched by 9.3million viewers, gaining 36% of the audience, and completely blowing BBC's Spooks out of the water. The spy drama, which aired the first episode of its 10[SUP]th[/SUP] and final series during the same time slot as Downton had 4.6million viewers. A representative for BBC claims they are more than happy with the figures they received.

Reaching mass audience success is not the only victory Downton Abbey's cast and crew can celebrate, however, since the weekend also brought them four Emmys including Best Supporting Actress in a Mini-Series for actress Maggie Smith and Best Mini-Series. The awards show, which was held at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, was attended by several of Downton's cast, many of which were nominated for awards.

Perhaps the only thing that put a damper on the show's achievements was ITV Player. The broadcaster's online platform suffered an outage that lasted several hours on Sunday. Subscribers that wanted to watch the first episode of the series, which was set to go online after it aired on TV, were only able to view three adverts on loop.

Viewers took to Twitter, voicing out their complaints. Among those expressing their disappointment and frustration were film maker Matt Buckler, and Suzy Jackson, CEO of Bright Young Events.

“Amazing how many tweets there are about ITV Player not working. Glad it's not just me! Astonishingly poor compared to BBC!” tweeted Jackson.

ITV posted an apology on their site admitting to “technical difficulties” and later issued a statement saying “We are investigating and apologise to those who were unable to use the service during this time.” However, the dedicated ITV Player Twitter account produced no replies to the complaints or questions being asked during the time of the difficulties.

The incident isn't the first time ITV Player has encountered problems. When streaming the first match of the World Cup last year, the online platform also experienced difficulty. According to sources, the player is currently undergoing a revamp as it gets ready to offer bespoke content or paid-for-internet-only shows of popular programmes like Coronation Street and The Only Way is Essex.

Chief Executive of ITV, Adam Crozier has said several times in the past that he wished to invest in and improve ITV Player, which has been somewhat neglected, so that it can catch up to other players, such as BBC iPlayer.


Considering they have a show that is currently in high-demand, they better best invest in it quick.

 

[2cvbloke]

That doesn't make much sense, people actually USE ITV player???

 

[PaulR]

Yes, I have.

I used it when you had to input the colour code. The quality is very low bit rate - around VHS or possibly even worse. What was more annoying was what happened on the advert breaks. The player seemed to forget where it had got up to and would drop me back before it had broken off for a break. Worse, the breaks just cut in seemingly at random, never where they were originally designed to go.

Five out of ten - needs some more work doing on it.

I haven't used it since.

 

[Llew]

Maybe ITV Player just got confused - apparently one third of Downton Abbey's 90-minute slot was advertisements and cross-promotion of ITV's up-coming (abysmal) programming.