ITV & problems with Rugby World Cup (RWC)

“ITV and problems with Rugby World Cup (RWC)”

Written on: 24/09/2011

I suspect I'm not the only one who has trouble with ITV and its attempts to cope with the demand on its website for England matches. I've managed to watch all the 'lesser' games at RWC with little problem, live and streaming. But England matches? Forget it.
Clearly England games will be the ones that put the most stress on ITV's servers and they manage to fail perfectly. The coverage is constantly interrupted by a refreshing icon, so much that I end up watching in four second bites. It'll freeze just as a penalty kicker is making contact with the ball, and resume with a scrum 80 metres away.
Either that, or I constantly get the message "the internet connection has failed. Please try again". Or something similar. Granted, the commentary is generally appalling anyway, so I actually woldn't miss the audio feed.
Of course I emailed ITV to complain, only to get the standard "we've passed your complaint to our technical team" reply almost a week later.
Sadly, like its attempts with the 2010 football World Cup, ITV can just get away with it. They're under no obligation to spend money on their online output, and yet can claim all manner of promises, like the internet companies who lie about their broadband speed.
Sadly, that's modern day British business...promise huge things first, ignore the complaints when they fail.
Cheers ITV.