Le Tour Toujours - unless you're trying to watch it online

For those of you who aren't so sad, you spend all your time watching Big Brother, you may have noticed that the Tour de France is on just now. I'm a bit of cycling nut so I was trying to catch up on the 2nd stage online yesterday. I did this a lot last year without problem so expected it to be a breeze.

However this year I have to deal with ITV's new player. I'm not going to bore you with the reasons why the BBC iPlayer is much better. Mostly because the BBC have never covered the Tour in my lifetime, so I don't care how good their interface is on this occasion. I will say that 'Catch up' is a gazillion times better as a label than 'iPlayer' though.

This year we understandably need to endure some adverts ITV.com but the way ITV has handled this is pretty poor.

You see, I was watching a 2 hour programme and as you might expect I had connection problems and lost the programme altogether. Getting back to the part of the programme I wanted was a nightmare. The fast forward feature does not allow you to go to the exact part of the programme you want to watch. Instead it just skips to the next ad break.

It took me a while to work this out. The player then disables the fast forward controls while it plays the adverts. You then have to wait for them to finish before skipping to the next advertising break and then the next and so on. You need to watch a section of the programme to see if it is the bit you need and then skip again if it isn't. For a 2 hour programme this is more than a little annoying.

The thing with catch-up TV is that the content is such a big draw that you can wrestle with bad interfaces for hours just to watch it. I spent over 3 hours trying to watch 2 hour programme. By the time I got to see the end of the stage my girlfriend had already told me who won.

I'm still considering a suitable punishment for her.