Demand5 all you want – you won’t get it…
Viewers of popular UK TV documentary series ‘Emergency Bikers’ cannot ‘Demand5’ or even ask nicely to watch episodes of the show from the latest series 3 which has been broadcasting on the UK TV channel ‘Channel 5’ over previous weeks.
Like most TV channels in the UK ‘Channel5’ offer an online catch-up/on-demand service for viewers to re-watch and catch-up on their favourite TV programs which they have missed. However, it seems Channel5 are the ones who decide what the viewers get to catch-up on and have failed to make available Episode 2 of Series 3 of the popular TV documentary ‘Emergency Bikers’ which follows the UK’s Motorbike Emergency Services on their daily duties serving the public as rapid response medics and police.
Episode 2 of this popular documentary originally aired on Thursday 19th May 2011 at 20:00 (UK time) and has failed to appear on the Channle5 ‘Demand 5’ catch-up service nearly two weeks after it was originally aired on TV. Yet Episode 3 which was on the following week has been made available online along with all of the other UK and USA TV shows Channel5 broadcasts each day.
Fans of the documentary have left numerous comments on the moderated comments board on the Demand 5 website of which they have only received one response to date from the Demand 5 moderation team, stating –
“Demand_FIVE
This episode of Emergency Bikers is not available due to a technical issue, but it will be available as soon as its rectified.”
However fans of Emergency Bikers are yet to receive any further update a week after the above comment from the Demand Five team was made, yet TV shows broadcast by Channel5 continue to be uploaded to the catch up service, very often the same night as they were aired. Emergency Bikers Episode 2 remains to be unavailable on the catch-up service.
The common question being asked by the fans of the show on the comments board is exactly how long does it take to resolve a technical issue with some fans offering to upload the TV show for Channel5 on to the Channels own You-Tube channel which also shows catch-up episodes.
Surely if this is a technical issue as described by the Demand5 team, this would affect more than just one episode of a TV show and even if the ‘technical issue’ was with that one episode, given that the episode is available to be watched online, it must be in a digital format of which you would hope an on-demand service such as Channel5 would have a backup of or easy access to another digital copy.
At the time of writing this article, numerous comments have been posted asking for a response from the Ch5 team, yet although the team moderate and approve these comments, they still remain silent.