June 15, 2020

7de Laan on VIU vs 7 de Laan on YouTube

Two weeks ago, it might’ve been 1 June 2020, new episodes of 7de Laan were nowhere to be found on YouTube. No prior announcement. No nothing. 7de Laan, or rather SABC, I guess, ghosted us on YouTube. It was only by doing a Twitter search that someone mentioned that 7de Laan was no longer being uploaded to YouTube on the same day as broadcast but was now on VIU.

Andre Lotter (Rickus) had a Facebook chat to describe some of the rationality behind moving to VIU but I left the video when he started reading of chat responses. I’m sure it’s a well-reasoned idea for SABC but just not for viewers.

I have used VIU in the past for watching live English Premier League football and watched for a few minutes until my stream broke, usually within 30 minutes of the match starting. I solved this problem when I Showmax started streaming the same match as VIU. So that was my initial experience with VIU.

So I found the 7de Laan episodes on VIU via my laptop and encountered a problem that I had come across before. A stupid message, “This site is protected by Opticks.” WTF is that even? I googled some solutions. It seemed that I needed to give permission to Chrome to access the site. Which I did. All just to see 7de Laan! I don’t know if the solution works or not because I still get the same old permission story.

But I was able to catch up with 7de Laan. And besides breaking for a few seconds to bring up some programming updates, I have no real problem with watching 7de Laan on VIU. The problem is I miss watching 7de Laan on YouTube. I wasn’t a comment contributor, but I miss the comments below the video. To a lesser extent, I mess that there are no adverts during the 7de Laan videos on YouTube.

Videos are still uploaded on YouTube, but a week later. The comments are now just a nuisance, especially when comments are about the show currently showing, instead of the show that’s playing on the video.

Whoever came up with this bright idea of putting 7de Laan on VIU instead of on YouTube… I actually have no words for you. It’s just so disappointing.