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Anytime TV - A Case Example of How Not to Do It

Any Australian internet users would, I'm sure, have recently been exposed to a bunch of ads talking about iiNet users having unmetred downloads on Anytime TV. I was excited to hear about this both because I'm an iiNet customer and because I think there is a strong market for digitally distributed movies. "Finally" I thought "someone has caught onto the fact that iTunes is popular and is going to offer an equivalent service for movies". Wrong. Anytime TV has to be a joke, because I can't think of any other reason that a company offering DRM laden movie downloads would have a range as miniscule as they do. Their purported "hundreds" of movies are in fact in the low 300s and while that still technically counts as "hundreds", I'm sure you'll agree that it doesn't warrant the expression. Aside from this, the whole site is broken in everything but Internet Explorer (and I'm not sure if it works in all versions of that either) and seems largely incomplete, with sections missing and broken Javascript everywhere (yes, even in IE). I'm not entirely sure, but I also suspect that they are including SQL in their query string parameters - I couldn't be bothered checking closely.

When I first heard about them, I had plans of writing a plugin for MediaPortal that would allow users to browse Anytime's range of movies, buy and watch them on their Windows-based Media Centres, but it seems like its not even worth the effort now. I tried to send them a message saying what I thought but I couldn't find anywhere to provide feedback (that's a great way to run a business), so I filed a tech support request with my message inside. Clean up your act Anytime, otherwise you'll just end up being a waste of time.

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Tags: Rant