demandfive

demandfive

Channel 5 in the UK service for watching previously shown TV programmes. Until recently, demandFive was known as fivedownload. Demand Five. "Your tv, your way" find it, watch it and shout about it!

With a mixture of instant free to view and pay per view options, you can easily catchup on favourites you might have missed in the week like Home and Away and Neighbours which have recently come to Channel 5 from BBC and ITV networks.

Also include access to the five channels, FIVEUSA and FIVER and has an excellent schedule planner so you can work out when programmes are on.

How demandFive Compares

Website: 80%
80% Rating
Speed: 85%
85% Rating
Ease of Use: 85%
85% Rating
Overall: 87%
87% Rating

Before each programme starts there are a few short advertisments that are required to be sat through, which is no real problem.

Purports a classy purple styled website with some very nice flash controls on the front page. Using Demand Fives shopping cart mechanism its really easy to buy pay per view content, for example shows that aired this week are free, but if you want to watch archived shows they cost 99 pence each.

To use the Demand Five you first need to create a login account so that you can "take control of your tv", to use another demandFives quite nice catchphrases!

The video quality is superb but this does come with the requirement that I found you need at least a 1MB internet connnection to be able to stream the video thats > 70KBs else you get an annoying "Buffering please wait" message every few seconds which makes viewing impossible.

Upsides:

  • Great Video Quality, plently of free programmes to view.
  • Nice, shiney and easier to navigate webpages which load quickly.
  • Excellent Schedule Planner.

Downsides:

  • Unwatchable unless you have a 1MB internet connection.