Flog — Web super–hero in training

TVNZ ondemand goes live

This week TVNZ has released their new online-video service, TVNZ ondemand.

It really is a fantastic service, and I think it almost puts us (NZ) up there with the big players, such as current ABC service and the rumoured BBC service.

The design is unexpectedly nice, given that the main TVNZ looks like a bag-of-arse (that’s a technical term) half the time. The feature that blew me away was the full-screen Flash video, which uses newer Flash features to display full-screen, as in no browser chrome at all and seamless. I have no idea why I haven’t seen this done on YouTube?!

DRM, as we all know, is the devil. So it’s a bit sad to see the pay-for-download video format (Window Media Video) slapped with it. If I pay for my copy for Shorty Street, I want to be able to play it anywhere damnit!

But the great news is that most of your favourite shows are there, and some of them are “TVNZ Free Video” – free to watch online in their entirety using your browser.

Downloading Free Videos

You can actually download any of the free video clips to watch offline in a lovely high resolution (for Flash video, it’s quite good quality – far better than YouTube).

If you view the source code of the TVNZ ondemand page you’ll find an object html reference with a parameter that looks like this (just do a find for “.flv”):

http://images.tvnz.co.nz/on_demand/images/Motif_FLVPlayback.swf?flvURL=http://download.tvnzondemand.co.nz/download/store1/flash/2007/nca/onenews_210307.flv

Simply copy and paste the relative flvUrl= value (e.g http://download.tvnzondemand.co.nz/download/store1/flash/2007/nca/onenews_210307.flv [notice the predictable URL naming, this is begging for some scripting]) into your browser or download-agent, and you can download the Flash Video file (.flv extension’d file) to watch offline whenever you want. I use VLC to play them back, works great.

Grab ‘em while you can!