Broadcasting17.09.2015

OntapTV.com tested – solid with some launch niggles

By Jan Vermeulen

OntapTV.com recently launched in South Africa, offering subscription video on demand services from R39 per month and online movie rentals from R15 per movie.

Its Mega Package, which includes all the content from its Family, Series, and Movie packs, costs R89 per month. Newer films such as Mad Max: Fury Road and American Sniper cost R25 to rent, valid for 48 hours.

To see how the service performs, we took it for a spin on a number of platforms using different Internet connections.

Different Internet connections tested

The first issue during testing – on 17 September – was that the OntapTV site did not load over ADSL while using Telkom Internet as the ISP.

After switching to a wireless Internet service provider (Level 7 in Centurion), OntapTV worked.

Later in the day, the service started to work on Telkom Internet.

Windows, Mac, and Android tested

OntapTV Doctor Who Season 1 page

OntapTV Select rental page

On Firefox for Windows, OntapTV worked without a hitch. Videos started quickly and the quality was upgraded automatically on faster connections. Sadly, it does not support Chrome.

OntapTV said this was because Google had dropped support for Silverlight and required anyone who needed digital rights management for content to use Widevine, a company it acquired.

Support for this plugin is in the works, said OntapTV, and Chrome support is on its way.

Testing on Safari and Firefox for Mac yielded a bug, where making the video full-screen caused graphical artefacts to flash on screen every few seconds.

OntapTV said it tested on OS X before launch, and found the bug report curious.

It took a note of the model tested on (2013 MacBook Pro with retina, A1502) and said it would try reproduce the glitching.

On our Android test device (LG G4) we caught another strange bug, where the app would show the error message “Media library general error” with two error descriptions.

The first error appeared while either streaming or downloading videos, but didn’t block the stream or download from going ahead.

The second error appeared while downloading, and also didn’t cancel the download.

We reported the error to OntapTV, and a representative said they would get a G4 to reproduce the bug and fix it.

OntapTV explained that with Android in particular, it was difficult to test every device. The company is expecting error reports to come in after launch for some of the devices it was unable to test.

“We’ve got the whole development team on standby to address these bug reports and we are expecting to do multiple updates over next couple of weeks,” said OntapTV.

OntapTV LG G4 error 1

OntapTV LG G4 error 2

On an iPad 3 running iOS 9, the OntapTV app was a little sluggish, but did not produce the issues as with the G4.

Playback took a little longer to start than on the G4, but once the video was playing we had no further complaints.

The quality was good, on-device stop/resume worked, and seeking through a video was quick.

Another niggle during testing across multiple platforms was that, much like ShowMax, OntapTV does not support resume between different devices.

If you stop a video on one device, you can resume it on that device from where you left off. However, if you play the same video on another device it will start from the beginning (or from where you left off on that device).

Downloading

Despite the error with the G4, it was still possible to download content to the device for offline viewing.

Although the app crashed when you tried to watch something offline, if you are online it is possible to watch downloaded videos without the error messages appearing.