weateallthepies.com

UPDATE 23/02/2008 :- Looks like this site has been closed now.

TVCatchup.com is a fairly new service which allows users to watch content from 23 free-to-air UK TV channels which includes all the major channels, BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, etc.

Once you have signed up you can use the TV schedule to set things to ‘record’ in your own private space which once recorded and encoded as flash video can be streamed directly from the site. It does the series link thing so you can get it to record a whole series and never miss an episode.

You can also watch loads of other archived shows which basically means you can watch anything, anyone has marked to ‘record’ as far as I can tell. It seems the only content not available is stuff that nobody wanted to watch in the first place.

TVCatchup claim that the site is legal but I’m not entirely sure how long they will last against the lawyers once things really kick off. It seems they are positioning themselves as a personal online recording service to comply with the time-shifting exemption of the Copyright Act yet I’m not sure how well this would stand up to scrutiny.

Never mind, it works, it’s pretty slick and it actually puts the efforts of the TV companies to shame in terms of ease of use, quality and scope of content. If you want to catch up on a few shows you missed then this is a pretty good option. I believe they are IP filtering so only for UK residents unless someone tells me otherwise.