Sbs.com.au

Okay, so full disclosure: I've mostly been using the on demand viewer of the site for the last couple of days, so that's what I'm going to be focusing on in this review. The good news is that the On Demand streaming service works fine. Like, it doesn't glitch out when I've been watching a movie or anything like that. It gives you three options for quality (720p, 360p, and 224p) which is admittedly a bit low when compared to Netflix or even YouTube at this point, but by the same token, this is a *free* service. They literally let you watch movies and shows on the site for free. This is the main selling point of the site, in my opinion. While it does require an email address for sign up, it doesn't require any banking details or anything like that. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even try to validate that you are who you say you are, so if you're a bit shy about giving online companies (or, in this case, a government-owned broadcast company) your real name, you don't need to worry too much. However, this does provide some major drawbacks for the site. The most noticeable drawback is that there are ads involved when you stream a movie. There's one set just before the movie starts, and then a few more over the duration of the movie. Thankfully, these ads aren't too intrusive. The ads also seem to be placed towards the end of a scene, so it's not like they're coming up in the middle of a line of dialogue like some of the ads on YouTube are wanton to do. The flipside to this is that because the movies I've watched on SBS On Demand have been movies I haven't seen previously, I don't actually know if they've been edited for the ad breaks or not. Still, if they are, this may not entirely be the fault of the SBS--a lot of streaming services, premium ones like Netflix included, are paying for the right to host a movie for a certain duration, and pretty much have to host the version the company gives them, regardless of whether or not that cut of the film is the cut you'd get on DVD or Bluray. The other thing with streaming specifically is that, unlike other streaming services, SBS On Demand doesn't seem to handle going back in the stream as well as other services. If you're forced to go back a bit because you didn't catch some dialogue or you wanted to watch a scene again, you're forced to either hit the back ten seconds button the twenty or so times it takes you to get to the start of the scene. If you click and point at a place on the progress bar like you might on YouTube or Netflix, the player might lag for long enough that you're better off refreshing the page to get the movie going again. That being said, refreshing the page won't force you to go back to the start of the movie again (an issue I've occasionally had with Stan and Disney+). It'll take you back to where you were in the movie. The actual range of films and shows is pretty limited, but by the same token, this isn't intended to be a huge expansive thing like other streaming services are. It's mostly supposed to just be stuff that's aired on SBS recently that you might have missed. To that end, the range is pretty good. Plus, y'know, it's a free service; even if it wasn't mostly just stuff the SBS had aired on TV lately, you couldn't reasonably expect it to have a huge range anyway. The internal search function works pretty well. In fact, the predictive text aspect of it seems to be its best feature, as it's entirely limited to what's already on the site. It's not like on Netflix where you might search for something, seeing that the title is being suggested by the search function, only to find out they don't have it. So overall, I think SBS On Demand is a good service, and while the drawbacks it does have are easily noticeable, they're pretty minor, all things considered.