Freeview in a browser – and your iPhone !


12 October, 2009 (11:49) Posted by Oli | ,

This new to me today, and it’s so good I thought I’d better post it here.

Ever wanted to watch live Freeview TV on your iPhone (UK only) ? Now you can.

Point your i device of choice at http://iphone.tvcatchup.com and away you go. It works great over WiFi, and I’m told it’s perfectly watchable on a 3G connection too !

At the moment only a selection of channels are available on the iPhone with more watchable on the desktop, but more are being added. Signup for the desktop version is free, though from what I can see no signup is required for the iPhone streaming.

One thing that’s missing is Hulu type playback of old episodes, but hopefully something similar will be added in the future.


I would be interested to see what happens if the urls are visited from outside the UK, though the documentation does say it won’t work. Do you get a nice error message perhaps ?

Check out here and here for more.


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Comments

Comment from Lewis King
Time: October 12, 2009, 4:22 pm

I’d be very surprised if a hulu style playback option happens. Take the BBC iPlayer for example, O2 specifically told them no 3G or Edge as it would clog the network, now iPlayer only runs on Wifi. It would be awesome, but I doubt it will happen.

Comment from Dean
Time: December 2, 2009, 7:23 am

In the US it says, “Sorry, our service is not yet available in United States”. Oh well.

Comment from Oli
Time: December 2, 2009, 12:38 pm

@Dean – Yeah, this is UK only I’m afraid. Still, you get Hulu!

Comment from Ivan Petrov
Time: March 8, 2010, 11:09 am

You can make it work outside the UK through private UK proxy, details can be found: http://www.gettvabroad.com/configuration/iplayer-abroad-on-the-iphone.html … only works over WiFi though, unless you have an unlocked iPhone…thats simply because by default the iPhone does not allow proxy server connections over 3G.

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