Introduction
It seems like an age since the TV through the internet craze took Australia by storm. While ABC iView and SBS On Demand are practically everywhere these days and the free-to-air networks are struggling to decide exactly what the internet is to them, Foxtel has been plugging along quietly with online video.
Initially, it was simply Foxtel on Xbox, which then made its way to Telstra’s T-Box and Samsung TVs. Foxtel Go arrived later, letting Foxtel subscribers get their entertainment on phones and tablets on the go.
But Foxtel Play is all of those services wrapped up in one. It’s the first comprehensive Pay TV offering delivered through the internet in Australia.
Available as an app for Windows PCs, Macs, Samsung Smart TVs and the Xbox 360 Foxtel Play is the sum of all Foxtel’s previous IPTV parts, offering comprehensive channel selection through a wide variety of devices.
Packages and pricing
Foxtel Play follows the company’s more traditional payment and packaging options. You pay a base rate for the most basic package, with the option to add additional channel packages for a fee.
But unlike the standard Foxtel subscription, Foxtel Play doesn’t have a lock in subscription fee or installation costs. Because all the content is delivered vis your internet connection, there’s no need for a technician to connect cable from the street or a satellite dish to your roof.
Foxtel Play is also cheaper than the cable or satellite based subscription, although not by as much as you might expect given there’s no set top box or PVR like the Foxtel iQ included in the price.
The basic pricing starts at $25 a month, and is offered in four different package configurations. There’s entertainment, which includes Fox8, Lifestyle, Arena, Lifestyle You, MTV, Comedy and TV1; Drama, which includes BBC UKTV, FX, SoHo, Universal Channel and SyFy; Documentaries, which includes National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo Adventure, Discovery, BBC Knowledge, Turbo Max, History and A&E; and Kids, which includes Disney, Disney Junior, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Boomerang and BabyTV.
You can throw multiple packages together as well, with Foxtel charging $35 for two packages, $45 for three and $50 for all four every month.
In addition, there are two premium packages on offer. Sports, which includes Fox Sports 1,2 and 3, FuelTV, EuroSport, ESPN1, ESPN2, Speed and Footy Play; and Movies and Premium Drama, which includes Showcase, World Movies, plus the Premiere, Masterpiece, Comedy, Action/Adventure, Drama/Romance, Thriller/Crime and Family movie channels.
Each of the premium packages will set you back $25 a pop, meaning a complete Play subscription will cost $100 a month.
No matter which package you sign up for, you also get access to Foxtel Go, allowing you watch on your tablet or phone, as well as access to the Sky News, Sky Business, Fox Sports News, V and V Hits channels.
Compared to the starting price of $47 a month for a regular Foxtel subscription, Play does seem like a much cheaper option. But when you scale up to the Platinum option, which costs $122 a month for 86 channels and an iQHD box, the savings are somewhat reduced.
There’s also a few caveats about channels though. For some weird reason, certain channels aren’t available on certain platforms. For example, TV1 and SyFy aren’t available to watch on PC/Mac, while World Movies isn’t available to view via Xbox 360.
Still, the advantage of not having to sign up for 24 months, as well as the benefit of being able to watch on multiple devices is alluring.
Installing and entertaining
Getting set up with Foxtel Play is a fairly straight forward affair. Head to Foxtel’s Play website, select your packages, fill in your credit card details, download the app and you’re pretty much good to go.
Setting up a second computer is slightly trickier, as Foxtel doesn’t have links to the software conveniently located on the Play website. It’s there – you just have to search around for it.
Meanwhile, connecting to the Xbox 360 app is as simple as downloading it from the Marketplace and then logging in once your account has been created.
The first time you open the app on your PC or Mac, you’ll be able to browse the EPG while Sky News plays in the background. When you actually try to select a program, the app will prompt you to login with your account details.
From there, you’ll be given access to all the channels you’ve paid for.
If you’re a parent and want to make sure your kids can only access appropriate material, the parental controls option is pleasantly simple.
First, you need to create a four-digit pin, confirm it, and from there set what rating level you want to be available.
If a user tries to access content above the pre-set rating, they’ll be required to enter the pin.
Pressing Play
There are three tabs on the app, including a home button and the two main components to Foxtel Play: Live TV streaming and Catch Up video on demand.
The Home tab offers a patchwork of live TV programs and popular catch-up programs, which kind of looks a bit like the Live Tiles from Windows 8. It’s a two column grid, with rectangular boxes of various sizes.
Weirdly, no matter the size of the window, you need to scroll down a little bit to see everything, but it’s not like there’s a lot of content below the screen to actually view.
Live streaming is exactly what it says on the box. The same content that’s broadcast via Foxtel on its selection of channels is streamed online via the Play service.
The default view shows a list of channels and current programs running down the right hand of the window, while the left shows the currently selected program, and the programs description below it.
There are two alternate views as well – one with the current channel shown as a thumbnail size next to a larger EPG, and a full-screen view that only shows the video playing.
You can limit the number of channels shown in the list by genre. As we were testing the service with the full channel offering, we’re not sure if it will only display the channels you’ve paid for, but there’s no menu option for “My channels” or something similar, so we’re doubtful.
Catching up
The final viewing option with Foxtel Play is Catch Up, which offers a selection of programs on demand, to watch at leisure from start to finish, often without the ad-breaks of the Live TV option.
Sadly, for anyone hoping for a serious Netflix competitor in this service, you’re destined for disappointment. While the range of programs on offer is pretty decent, with hundreds of TV shows, movies and documentaries available, the depth of each offering is quite shallow.
TV shows, in particular, only have a handful of episodes on offer at any given time. In other words, there’s no option for binging on your favourite show with Foxtel Play. Instead, it really is a catch up service like the name suggests, letting you watch a show you might have missed in its primetime viewing slot.
While that’s slightly frustrating for Australians hoping for an Aussie version of Netflix, it does make sense. This is a Pay TV company, after all, which has a business plan built around the broadcast model of entertainment.
Given time, we may see a more consistent a la carte version of catch up through Foxtel Play, but at this stage, it’s a reasonable strategy.
DRM and Video Quality
What, you didn’t expect Rupert Murdoch’s beloved Australian Pay TV company to dive into a DRM-free online portal, did you?
The good news is that the restrictions on Foxtel Play aren’t too draconian. You can register three devices to the service, although that does include Foxtel go as well. Generally, that’s probably going to be a computer, a tablet and an Xbox 360 or Samsung TV.
While you can opt for a range of permutations and combinations in terms of what devices you connect, you can only connect a single Xbox 360. We’re not sure why – probably because multiple 360s really would eat into Foxtel’s multi-room charging strategy.
And while three devices can be connected to a Play account, only two of them can stream video at a time. So forget about having four family members watching four different things on four different devices. You’ll need to pony up the cash for two accounts for that to happen.
Video Quality
In terms of video quality, there are only two settings – Best and Low. Best is actually very decent – we’d go as far as describing it as almost up to DVD quality, although it does depend on your broadband connection. That said, our fairly slow ADSL2+ connection managed the stream effortlessly, and it only took between five and ten seconds to buffer a new video.
The Low quality is still very decent, at least on a computer. While pictures lack definition, they’re still very watchable on a smaller screen. The lower setting on the Xbox 360 is a lot harder to view, but is certainly no worse than watching most YouTube clips on the big screen.
The video quality setting is one thing many users will need to pay attention to, given the bandwidth restrictions on home (and mobile) broadband plans.
According to the service’s FAQs, the highest quality setting will chew through 1310MB of data every hour, while the low setting will only use about 470MB.
In other words, if you left the lowest quality streaming 24 hours a day for a month, you’d likely use up more than 300GB of data. At the highest setting, you’ll probably crack 900GB.
While those usage cases are unlikely, you may still want to upgrade your broadband plan before signing up.
Verdict
It’s clear that Foxtel has put a lot of thought into creating a proper Pay TV service for the internet with Play. It’s sleek, easy enough for anyone to use, and comprehensive in its offering.
But, it is still Foxtel. If you’ve given up paying big bucks for television because of the hours and hours of rubbish programming between one or two decent shows, this isn’t for you. It’s still the same old content Foxtel churns out day in and day out on its broadcast channel, only delivered through the internet.
But it’s impossible to doubt the benefit of moving to an IP based system. No longer is your television locked to your home. You can take your Foxtel subscription with you on holiday, or hospital, or anywhere else you may need to go.
Of course, whether that convenience is worth the price of entry is up for debate. But if you’re likely to pay for Foxtel in the first place, you probably won’t balk at the asking price.
We Liked
It”s so convenient and quick. Even on a fairly poor ADSL2+ connection and a two year old Mac, it still took less than 10 seconds to buffer. Once it started, we never experienced a bump in playback.
The ability to stream to multiple devices also won us over. While it’s probably a little bit stricter with the DRM than we’d like – only having two simultaneous connections when you can only have three connected devices seems a bit weak to us – the convenience is still something you don’t really get with a full Foxtel subscription.
We Disliked
We’ll be honest, we were hoping for more from the Catch Up service. It’s not that there’s nothing to watch via Catch Up, it’s just that it’s not really a viable way to discover a new show. We’d like to be able to try pilot episodes of programs, and then follow through if we like them, like you can with Netflix.
The harder pill to swallow though is the price. Sure, a single package seems like pretty good value. But in this was an opportunity for Foxtel to bring a la carte channel subscriptions to the table.
The biggest problem with Foxtel in general is that you need to pay for half a dozen channels you don’t care about to get the one channel you do.
In broadcast that may make sense, but this is the internet, and there’s simply no reason why users shouldn’t be able to create their own package with only the channels they want to pay for.
But more than that is the fact that a complete Play subscription gets you 48 channels, some of which won’t play on certain devices. A Platinum broadcast subscription gets you 86 channels, plus an iQ box and HD channels, for an extra $22 a month.
When you factor in you have to pay for broadband usage as well, it simply doesn’t stack up as an affordable alternative.
Final Verdict
This is a step in the right direction, make no mistake. But Foxtel probably has played it just a little bit too safe for it to really disrupt the current market.
There’s a good chance that in 15 years, pretty much all television will be consumed via the internet. With that in mind, Foxtel Play is a good, solid first step for the Pay TV company, after its previous crawling attempts.
We’d love to see more versatility in packaging and pricing, as well as more of a push to on demand streaming. But given the way Foxtel makes its money, there’s a good chance we’ll be waiting a while for that.
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