Caught Up for Firefox

On Friday 11th September 2009, ITV overhauled their Catch Up system, finally including the use of Flash instead of Silverlight.

As with the UK's other commercial terrestrial channels (and in line with the BBC), ITV has switched to the more widely-installed and stable Flash platform for streaming television programmes online.

As this Firefox add-on was initially written to help people who could not install — or had problems with — Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in (it still doesn't work on my Mac in Firefox), there is no longer any need for this Firefox add-on.

The Caught Up add-on for Firefox and its associated web service has now been discontinued.

Details

The previous versions of the add-on, before ITV changed their system, relied on several factors:

• Shows were available online — unencrypted — to anyone who knew the correct URL
• The URL to each video could be accessed by anyone, in any country
• The associated video stream could be accessed by anyone, in any country
• Video was in the (relatively) standard Windows Media Video format, recognised by most media players

Essentially, anyone could get easy access to the programmes on the ITV site.

Since ITV's change of system, virtually all of this has changed:

• Video is now broadcast in an encrypted stream
• Video is encoded using a variant of the Flash Video protocol, which is not as widely playable
• The country checks have changed, now potentially restricting viewers only to the UK

This means it's nowhere near as simple or practicable to construct a Firefox add-on to work with these changes.

Additionally, I no longer live in the UK and haven't even watched ITV since they lost the Formula 1 rights!

Alternatives

As the majority of the add-ons users appear to be living outside the UK, the fact that ITV's site should now work properly for most users isn't really of consolation.

The best I can do is to link to alternative sites or places where guidance can be sought on watching UK TV shows:

• STV Video — Well-implemented catch-up site by ITV's Scottish franchisee
• uPlayer — Irish ITV franchisee
• UKNova — BitTorrent downloads of UK TV programmes

Contact

Note: I cannot provide any guidance on how to watch ITV or any other TV streams, beyond the above links.

For now, you can still contact me directly via this site.

Previously...

For the curious, the previous version of this site can be viewed here.