Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

I can admit when I’m wrong, I don’t always like it but I can. When companies started talking about internet based on-demand TV I thought that the bandwidth requirements would overwhelm the technology, I was wrong and I’m really quite glad about that.

I haven’t signed up for any of the paid-for services but have found uses for the free ones. I’ve said before that I watch Antiques Roadtrip and as this is on while I’m at work I use the BBC iPlayer to watch it via a Roku on my TV, or on my tablet. Similarly I tended to relocate other shows to a time when there wasn’t anything else on the TV – or more recently on the radio, as I hardly use the telly anymore, or when I’m not busy doing something else.

It’s a far cry from when I was growing up – when the only technology we had to timeshift a programme was a VCR and a selection of tapes. The major problems, I remember, were remembering to set the timer; hoping that a power cut didn’t wipe the machine’s memory before it recorded whatever it was you wanted; finding a blank tape, or one you could reuse and ensuring that nobody wanted to record something else at the time. There was always the worry that someone would record over something you’d not watched yet. I do vaguely remember the broadcasters’ and manufacturers’ reminders that the VCR was only intended to temporarily timeshift shows like this.

After the VCR came other tech including hard-disc recorders, often including multiple tuners so you could record programmes from two or more channels at once, but these were soon rendered obsolete as well by streaming and catch-up services.

Recently I took advantage of an Amazon Prime free trial to watch Star Trek: Picard, and then signed up for a month so I could finish it – not being a binge watcher myself. This was an extreme example of timeshifting, being almost a year after it came out – a bit easier than waiting for it to be repeated on normal TV. Not that TV repeats are all bad – I usually end up watching QI a year after it’s shown on the BBC on the Dave channel, which has itself been so successful in repeating that it now gets referenced on shows such as, er, QI.

Catch-up and live internet radio is just as useful for listening to a show that’s on too early or late at a time when another show you’re not interested in is on. It also comes in handy when you’re listening to live radio, for example last week’s Liza Tarbuck on BBC Radio 2, and you miss something that someone’s said. In this case I grabbed my phone, fired up BBC Sounds and rewound the show by a minute. Which is one of the benefits of all these internet based services – radio and TV: you can go back and look at something again, pause it and write something down, or, most importantly, take a break and make a cuppa.