Who online?

A few days back I noticed that the Beeb had done a deal with YouTube to officially stream stories from the classic series. This, I thought was a step in the right direction. But alas, my excitement at finding the stories below was short lived... the all to familiar message "This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions" flashed up on my screen. Now I´m used to this on the BBC Who website, where I can´t watch any embedded clips, and hence have to wait for YouTube reposts and the like. But this time I´d allowed myself to hope YouTube had negotiated worldwide distribution.

The first wave of stories on YouTube are

The Edge of Destruction,
The Krotons
Carnival of Monsters
Planet of the Spiders
The Masque of Mandragora
The Twin Dilemma

Strange that there are two Pertwee stories and no Davison, or McCoy, and why why why would anyone want to watch the Twin Dilemma I do not know, but suit yourselves!

And so it was I nearly overlooked that MSN Video had done a similar deal. Now I normally avoid Microsoft when given the choice, but thought it worth a quick look to see which stories thay had, with no expectation of actually being able to watch them. But what a surprise to find I could... only now I´ve gone back to the site I can´t... "video cannot be played from your current location". T y p i c a l . I again put this down to the technological conspiracy against me.

The Web Planet
Tomb of the Cybermen
Planet of the Spiders
The Talons of Weng Chieng
The Caves of Androzani

And the promise of new episodes every Tuesday and Friday! Watch them here.

I´m so pissed I can´t view these, especially when I thought for a bit that I could! Now I am going to have to keep checking this site in case I manage to get it working again!

The Waters of Mars

I suppose I have to post something on the most recent Who episode, The Waters of Mars, so here it is. I´ll refrain from posting a summary of the story, or my views on it, as I´m sure you don´t really care.

Like most megalomanics, I´m an exile from my own people, so couldn´t watch it on the BBC... in fact I´ve only seen one "live" episode of the new Who (Doomsday part II). Instead I have to rely on downloading or viewing on the net. Obviously, when I reach my full potential as an all powerful megalo´ I´ll buy all the episodes on DVD (well, actually I intend to buy the BBC, but anyway), so until then I´m an illegal downloader.

And boy, does it suck. It´s either a case of waiting hours to download the whole file through a bit-torrent, or watching on a YouTube type site... which resets every time the connection fails (Oh, yeah, I´m a wi-fi piggy-backer, so that happens a lot!).

On top of this, I have a love hate relationship with technology... there´s something about these damn machines that sense my frustaition and impatience. The more stressed I get, the more they decide to play with my mind and not do what I want them too. It´s a conspiracy of technology, and proof that artifical intelligence is already here (as with the goldfish, I believe man consistantly under-estimates the intelligence of non-human life forms!). So my viewing of Mars yesterday was a classic case of failed connections, reset downloads and having to watch the whole thing from the beginning about four times before I got to the end... which was the best bit, to be honest.

If only the Beeb would let us use iPlayer outside of the UK and watch on their official site then they would have better hits, viewing figures and happy whovians. But as we don´t pay their lovely license fee that´s just not allowed!

There are many, many sites and blogs following the new Who series, posting links to downloads and sites where you can view the show, but for my money (or lack of), I have to give a bow to "Life, Doctor Who & Combom", a great blog which posts everything and anything who related. So instead of repeating a whole load of stuff here, let me guide you there. But be warned, there´s also a fair number of "spoilers" in the form of new season info...

Hats off to you Combom, you´ve saved what´s left of my sanity over the last few months as we´ve waited for this latest episode!