ITV Player Review

What a useless pile of Tripe!

I have been hearing horror stories regarding the ITV Player (Android) for over two years now. Friends and others have often ranted about how slow or how pixelated the streaming had been. Seems that over the past couple of years ITV had been trying to sort these problems out but to no avail it seems.

I myself had always steered clear of this App not just because this App was pants but because I don't normally watch much ITV telly.
That was until yesterday when I realised The World Series of Darts was been covered on ITV 4.  I love watching Darts so in an act of desperation I downloaded the software from the Playstore.

Honestly! What the hell is wrong with ITV and its App developers? The streaming was crap at best.
Every few seconds I was treated to horrific frame jumping which was amusing at first but slowly turned absolutely horrendous to watch even on non-action Darts games. I dread to think how this would look with a fast paced feature film. It is simply diabolical.

On closer inspection it seems that ITV Player pretty much eats all your available memory, slows down your device and consumes more data than perhaps it should. I don't really understand why? The BBC and SKY Go media player rivals don't seem to have these issues at all? It's not really rocket science lads!

Take a quick look at the good and bad reviews on the Google Store:

There are more bad reviews than good.. Surprise, surprise

Rating: 2/10
✅✅
And that's being generous
Its sad really how a highly respected company like ITV can leave this heap of cack to roam free on the Playstore unrepaired. It's staggering that they seem oblivious to the negative reviews and fail to address the issues.
Personally speaking this App will be deleted from my device as soon as the Darts Tournament is over and good riddence!
I would say don't bother downloading this unless you were absolutely desperate to watch something like I was.

Tesco Announce the death of Hudl

Hudl Project Shelved Indefinitely

It has been a fortnight since Tesco announced to the world that it was no longer selling the critically acclaimed Hudl 2.  (I only posted a review on it the other week!) This came as a shock to Hudl owners but was not entirely surprising considering the financial problems Tesco has been having recently. The rise in discount retailers such as Aldi and Lidl has badly eaten into Tescos market dominance. Combine that with the revelation that they had cooked their books when the auditors came round made Tesco rethink their strategy and focus more on their core business of flogging good old Groceries. This means that most of their non related lines have been axed including Blinkbox and the Hudl Tablet project. Early indications that something was wrong was when one of the chief bods on the project was relieved of his duties. The next indicator was the price slashing of Hudl accessories. The third was the empty Tablet spaces on the Hudl aisle displays....
So the Hudl 2 only lasted a year....

Tesco said they were not replenishing stocks but would still offer technical support and honour warranties. That's nice of them.

Quite honesty I find it staggering that they would pull the Hudl now and not after the Christmas period. Simply because they could easily sell all their remaining stock and accessories in one go. Plenty of people are still asking for them. The demand is huge. 

It's a shame