Netflix is growing in popularity in the UK. If the company is to be believed, the movie streaming service has seen a promising uptake on these shores since its launch in January. Electricpig’s been chatting to the people behind the streaming to figure out exactly how your movies get from the cloud to your screen.

Netflix’s cloud architect Adrian Cockroft and its corporate communications director Joris Evers were in town this week to discuss the magic that makes the service possible. Electricpig grilled them into dishing it out in terms real humans can understand, as well as the various problems in bringing content to different areas and devices all at once.

How do Netflix movies get to our screens?

Adrian: “Netlflix has two main systems. One of them is all the control required to set everything up, and the other is the bits that make up the movie. Most of what we think of as ‘cloud architecture’ is under our control, so that’s where our software lives.

“The movie bits themselves are delivered using three content delivery networks. That’s like using the post office to deliver DVDs. They’re companies that we do all the work for – we decide which movies go where and all the addressing and all that stuff, then we give them a virtual envelope.

“We have three suppliers that can deliver bits to you. When you fire up your device, it registers itself with the back end with a series of APIs. It says who you are. Then we do the personalisation stuff that figures out who you are and delivers your choice of movies, based on region.

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“Those get delivered to the user interface and then you start browsing around. This is all interacting with the APIs at the back end. There’s a separate API for each Netflix device: the Xbox 360, the PS3, the iPad, etc.

“Then when you click ‘play’, it moves onto a slightly different part of the API, which does some DRM key exchanges (so we can handle all the security required to authenticate you to play that movie), then we hand the player a bunch of URLs that one of our three suppliers recognise.”

Why use three suppliers?

Joris: “Sometimes UPS is faster than FedEx!”

Adrian: “Part of the problem is that, from the last number I saw, we accounted for about 40 per cent of the total US bandwidth being delivered – to get that much traffic requires more than one company to handle it. We need at least two to support the traffic – we need three so that if something goes wrong we can still run on the other two.

“So it’s partly as failsafe, partly because these are the three terabit suppliers; they supply in numbers measured in terabits per second. We’re a customer that needs many terabits to run. So we need them for capacity and space.

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“Some of them function slightly better in some parts of the world as well. All three operate everywhere in the world, but some might have better coverage in Europe, for example. It’s about shifting the percentages of traffic around.”

Why move into the cloud? 

Adrian: “We got into the cloud earlier than most people. We hit a point where we decided that we needed to do something, and didn’t want to build costly data centres around the world. The cloud was a new idea being used by startups but we needed it because we knew we were going to be big. We trialled it and went for it a year or two ahead of most other companies. That’s part of the culture at Netflix; we try to get a competitive advantage out of doing things earlier.

“We’re not unusual in the way we’re doing stuff – we’re just ahead of the market by a year or two. Other companies will be working the way we are in two or three years’ time, but we’ve got ahead of the curve a bit.

“The way we run in the cloud is something that we want to be generic – we want more people using it because the more people are using it, the better it works for everyone. If you’ve got one person using a power station and they don’t want to use power that day, what’s the power station going to do? You need a large number of customers, where one customer becomes a tiny percentage.

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“The cloud is a utility model – if I’m not using it one day someone else is. Averaged out, that gives a very predictable amount of load – where no one customer can actually drive traffic in any strange way.”

Is a reliance on streaming services like Netflix going to cause bandwidth issues?

Adrian: “There is always one bandwidth issue for any particular consumer: you may have too many people in your neighbourhood going through one point, but in general bandwidth is increasing rapidly everywhere. The money we’re spending on the content delivery networks is being used to improve their ability to provide bandwidth. A lot of the money we’re putting into the internet is going to build out that capacity.”

Joris: “When you want to watch a movie in London, it’s not as if your device is reaching out to our office in the US and streaming from there to here via public internet. There’s too much data and over 23 million people on the Netflix line – it wouldn’t work. That’s why cloud architecture works better – it gets us as close to you as possible through content delivery networks. You’re getting your movie from a system probably very close to you with a copy of Netflix on it.”

Adrian: “Lets say you’re with Virgin Media; that ISP will have a relationship with our three suppliers to deliver content to you, or might have machines actually inside Virgin Media. They work very closely with ISPs.

“What we did for Europe was quite interesting because we realised that running out of the same date centre that we use for the Americas and Canada would cause too much latency in crossing the Atlantic – the experience would be slow.

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“So we set up with AWS in the cloud in Ireland, which runs between Ireland and the US, but is big enough to run the UK and Ireland should the US system go down. We just keep adding machines to that.

“If for some reason the US site’s not working, it will still work here. There are many possible ways that these things could break, but we’ve built a very resilient system that can survive all sort of outages. Even when it’s broken we’ve made it so it’s hard to tell – you just get slightly different movie choices, for example.”

How different is it streaming to mobile? Is it more difficult?

Adrian: “It’s the same infrastructure. The mobile clients talk to the same back end as the games consoles. We treat them the same way, but we’ve added some extra low bandwidth streams that we wouldn’t otherwise have included, so that you can stream even if you’re on a low signal.

If you can receive enough signal to push bits through, you can stream Netflix. Because the screen is so small you can get away with a low resolution signal. The iPad tends to want a higher quality, but small screens don’t need high bandwidth. It’s adaptive.”

What’s the uptake been like on mobile devices?

Joris: “Most of Netflix streaming happens on a TV through a games console. Those are by far the three most popular platforms. PC comes after that. Then we see a lot of other devices.”

Adrian: “With mobile, actual viewing hours are quite low, but in terms of activity it’s quite high. What you see is that in a given week, people will use mobile relatively often but for short periods of time, and not that intensively. That uses lower bandwidths so it’s less load for us. But mobile drives the business. People want to have it on these devices.”

Should we be wary of subscription streaming?

Joris: “We don’t split it up in terms of percentages, but a lot of people are firing Netflix up on mobiles and tablet devices and trying it out. It’s still a very small percentage, but it’s growing. It’s still a very small percentage of Netflix viewing.”

Adrian: “We saw a jump in Netflix being fired up on a tablet after the Christmas holidays on the iPad and the Kindle Fire. Android bumped up quite a bit with the Kindle Fire. Tablets are being used more than phones, in general.

“You can assume that Netflix will be on anything from any major vendor from now on. If anyone launches without Netflix it would be strange. You don’t have to ask ‘will we be there’ – the question is what will it look like and how will it be integrated?”

Joris: “We want to be on every relevant screen.”

How has Netflix’ UK uptake been?

Joris: “It’s great – better than expected. we release numbers quarterly – the next batch will be in April – but we’re very pleased by the reception we’ve had. We had 23+ million streaming customers globally as of the end of December 2011.”

This time, it’s very different. Mac OS X Lion is stuffed full of user-facing features, and promoted by Apple as “the power of Mac OS X. The magic of the iPad” and across the operating system features from the tablet have taken root. For unabashed iPad fans that’s likely to be a cause for celebration but for long time OS X users, there could be a steep learning curve. Does the iOS world with its grids of icons and rampant use of gestures work well now it’s migrated back to the Mac? Let’s find out…

Installation

The Mac OS X Lion installation process is incredibly simple. As long as you have an up-to-date version of Snow Leopard on your machine, you simply head for the Mac App Store, hit buy and watch the download jump into the dock. Once the 3.74GB file has downloaded, you’re greeted by a very minimal installer app. And it really is minimal, the only option open to you is choosing the disk location. Lion’s licence covers all the Macs in your home but if you want to avoid having to download the installer for each one, make sure you copy it to a USB drive before you open it as the file self-destructs after use.

Scrolling

The first thing you notice when starting Mac OS X Lion is a message from Apple that scrolling has changed. Inverted scrolling is now the default which means pushing up scrolls down and vice versa. The move has caused lots of debate and moaning online but actually it does make sense. Rather than moving the scroll bar, you’re now moving the content in the window just as you do on the iPhone and iPad. That doesn’t mean it feels right straight away though. On a touchscreen device where you are interacting directly with the screen, the scrolling method immediately makes sense but with a trackpad and screen it can take some time to get used to, especially since you can still see the scroll bar moving the other direction. You can change back to the traditional scrolling method in settings but give it time before you retreat to your comfort zone – we think Apple has made the right move here, especially since so many OS X machines are laptops with built-in trackpads. Speaking of which:

Gestures

The range of multitouch gestures deployed in Mac OS X is quite baffling. The horizontal three-finger-swipe – previously used to flick through pages in lots of apps – moves through desktop spaces and full-screen apps, a vertical three-finger-swipe activates the new Mission Control feature while LaunchPad is accessible via an awkward pinch using three fingers and your thumb. A spreading gesture with your thumb and three fingers still clears the screen to reveal the desktop below. On a built-in trackpad or the Magic Trackpad, they’re relatively easy to execute but attempting most of them on a Magic Mouse is a recipe for RSI. If you’re buying an iMac anytime soon, for pity’s sake choose the trackpad as your bundled accessory.

Mission Control

In Mac OS X Lion, Exposé and Spaces have hooked up to give birth to Mission Control. A bird’s eye view of all the windows on your current desktop grouped by application, it also shows a list of additional desktops and full-screen applications. Adding new desktops is as simple as dragging an application window to the top of the screen. Desktops and full-screen apps shuffle in with each other so you can flick through them with a three-finger horizontal swipe. It’s great for inveterate multitaskers but if you weren’t already using Spaces, you probably won’t find yourself relying on Mission Control any time soon.

LaunchPad

LaunchPad is the most direct lift from iOS in the whole of Mac OS X Lion. It takes over the screen presenting your applications in the same grid format used by an iOS homescreen. You can then flick through pages and group apps in folders in exactly the same way as on an iPhone or iPad. That’s brilliant if you’ve got a reasonably small amount of programmes and buy most of them from the Mac App Store but if you’ve got a lots on your machine it becomes a lot less useful. It gets tiring having to page through screens to find the app you’re after and organising a lot of icons is tiresome. You can only remove apps directly from the LaunchPad if you bought them from the Mac App Store. Apps you purchase from there automatically pop up in LaunchPad. Based on a few days use, LaunchPad really does feel like a gimmick at the moment rather than a transformative way to access your applications. If you’re used to pressing command+space and then pressing a letter or two to quickly launch an application, you’ll never use it.

Full-screen apps

Application windows work differently in OS X Lion. There are small tweaks (the trio of close/minimise/maximise buttons are a lot smaller) and major ones (scroll bars only show up when you scroll or hover over the right edge of a window or scroll on your trackpad). The loss of a permanent scroll bar can feel slightly odd in some applications, particularly text editors and iTunes. Meanwhile the ability to manually resize windows by dragging at any edge is very welcome and incredibly overdue. Biggest of all the changes though is the arrival of fullscreen apps. Windows users may scoff that it has included that feature for eons but in the case of Mac OS X Lion, fullscreen means a little more.

In Lion-optimised apps, a new button in the top right hand corner activates full-screen mode. At a basic level it hides the dock and menu bar allowing the app to encompass the whole screen but results vary depending on what programme you’re using. In iCal, the changes are minimal but iPhoto and GarageBand both rearrange the layout of the whole app. It’s visually appealing and definitely helps you focus on whatever you’re working on but it can feel a little odd having to hunt around to find the rearranged controls. When you’re running a full-screen app, it acts as a space in its own right so you can flip between it, any other full-screen app and your open desktops.

iMac or Cinema Display users may scoff at this, and to be frank, for heavy Photoshop editing with multiple windows it’s useless, but after testing OS X Lion on a new 11-inch MacBook Air, we’re sold on it. More casual users will love being able to swipe through a small handful of applications (Mail and Safari, say) this way.

Finder

Apple loves messing around with the Finder to see how stripped back it can make it. This time that means the row of icons in the left hand menu have been turned monochrome, following in the footsteps of iTunes 10 which first introduced the desaturated approach. As with the jukebox app, the change has simply made the menu harder to navigate at a glance. It’s one of those aesthetic decisions by Apple that really doesn’t make very much sense.

The other big change to Finder is the new default view, All My Files, which sorts your files into Cover Flow-style rows. Apple appears to be attempting to encourage you to see your files as one big soup of information to sifted through rather than a stack of folders. If the new view doesn’t appeal to you, and for us, with our thousands of word docs, it does not, it’s easy to navigate through the Finder in other more familiar ways.

The search function in Finder has also had a significant upgrade. Type a word and it suggests a search category to apply to it, making it far easier to quickly drill down to the item you’re after. It’s smart too: if you type in a date or file format it will recognise the type of information you’re giving it. The same kind of intelligence has been applied to the Quick Look function which now allows you to preview videos and audio directly in Finder as well as letting you take a close a look at them and other files using the Quick Look button. The ability to add frequent file searches as well as locations to the left hand menu is also a great new addition.

Spotlight

Like Finder, Spotlight has been tweaked in Mac OS X Lion. You can now drag and drop files straight from the Spotlight drop down menu and Quick Look has migrated there too. That’s really handy for quickly finding an image or music file you’re after and it even includes websites as the search now extends beyond what’s just on your system.

Resume, Versions and AutoSave

Resume, Versions and AutoSave are three of the quietest but potentially most revolutionary new features in Lion but they’re not without their issues. Resume means that the OS remembers its state, so that when you restart or turn on your machine again you’ll find the applications that were previously open ready to use just as they were before. That’s a familiar experience from modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox but with your whole desktop in play, it can feel slightly claustrophobic after being used to a clean slate when you first switch on your machine. If you’re concerned web pages you’d rather the world didn’t see will automatically be restored, don’t worry – Restore respects private mode in web browsers and can be switched off entirely in settings. Whew.

Versions takes the Time Machine concept of being able to roll back your hard drive to a previous state and applies it to individual files, even using a version of the same UI. Rather than saving over the previous incarnation of a file when you hit Command-S, you’re now saving a version of it. You can then go back and review previous versions and even revert to them. The feature is only present in a few applications at the moment (notably Preview, Pages and TextEdit) but third-party developers will be able to easily add it using Apple’s SDK. Versions will become really useful when iCloud launches making it easy to keep track of editing you’ve done across different devices. One slight concern is the way versions multiply in the Finder, quickly cluttering up the list view.

AutoSave is the third part of Apple’s new approach to saving files in Mac OS X Lion. In addition to manually-saved versions of files, OS X periodically saves a version of documents you’re editing. In applications that support AutoSave, that means the slow death of the Save dialog. Instead, if you close an app that includes AutoSave, it will just shut down, keeping the active document as you left it.

Safari

Home advantage makes Safari the best browser on Mac OS X Lion, for now. While other options including Firefox and Chrome have lost gestures they previously used to allow you to whip around the web, Safari has gained pinch-to-zoom and double tap-to-zoom plus the ability to navigate between website with a two-finger swipe – moving back a page has never been so seamless. It’s also had a speed boost and is more stable thanks to sandboxing which separates the processes at work in a particular tab from the application as a whole. Hopefully though, rival browsers will gain the same gesture support in their next updates.
One side note: Flash, which Adobe readily admits is only in beta for OS X Lion, barely works at all right now. We’ve only got one YouTube video to load so far – but you can bet Adobe will be patching this up sharpish.

Mail, iCal, Address Book

Mail and iCal both take their cues from their cousins on the iPad. The updated version of Mail now dedicates the entire left hand side of the screen to a message listing with two-line previews (which can be extended via system preferences). Emails are now grouped together in conversations and search has been powered up just as in Spotlight and Finder. Curiously with Address Book and iCal, Apple has decided to continue its taste for celebrating dying analogue formats. By default iCal goes for the tear sheet design first shown on the iPad and Address Book is literally an address book though the addition of iPhoto importing and the ability to make FaceTime calls straight from the app makes it a lot more useful.

Account management

Along with tweaking Mail, Apple has also brought account management into the heart of the system. Head to System Preferences and you’ll find a dedicated menu for adding in your Gmail, Exchange, MobileMe, Yahoo! and AOL accounts. This will also eventually be home to your iCloud account and allow you manage all your syncing and remote storage from one place.

AirDrop

One of our favourite features in Mac Os X Lion is AirDrop. It’s an incredibly simple way to swap files between Macs which doesn’t need you to be on the same network to do its stuff. Rather than using a Wi-Fi network as a middle man, AirDrop makes a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection between Airports. Clicking AirDrop in Finder activates a search for Macs running Lion within 30ft which it identifies with the owner’s Apple ID. To share a file you simply drag it onto the other user’s icon and they’ll receive a message asking if they want to accept the file. If they do, an animated image of the file you’re sharing leaps straight into their Downloads folder. The transfers are encrypted and very speedy according to our tests with a 53MB file making the leap in just under a minute.

Hidden gems and odd additions

Apple has trumpeted 250 new features in Mac OS X Lion and there are plenty you’ll just stumble upon. It took us a few days to realise that the forthcoming iOS 5 Twitter integration has already been presaged by the option to tweet any text you select and the new low-power wake mode that allows you to remotely access files without switching on your Mac’s screen is a welcome addition. The craziest new feature we stumbled upon though was in Preview which now allows you to add a signature straight into a PDF using the iSight camera. Open a PDF, click the annotations button then the signature button and you’ll be greeted with a window encouraging you to sign your name on a piece of white paper and hold it up to the camera. Bingo! A reusable digital signature. Microsoft, you need to steal this.

The addition of system-wide AutoCorrect may seem a little less welcome. The bane of many an iPhone user’s life and star of its own internet meme, Damn You AutoCorrect, has graduated to the Mac and while it’s not as wild as its mobile cousin, you might want to switch it off. It doesn’t capitalise the first word in every sentence or randomly decide that a reference “reading” must mean the city of Reading but does make small corrections automatically. Netbooks are netbacks. What the hell is a netback? It does highlight corrections with a blue underline and offer up suggestions for alternatives but if you still have nightmares about being lectured by Clippy back in the day, it’s another feature that can be switched off in settings.

Compatibility

Installing onto a clean system worked like a dream but on our 13-inch MacBook Air, which had previously had the contents of an old MacBook Pro migrated to it, we did notice some issues. The main one was multiple versions of Apple apps clogging up LaunchPad. It seems if you’ve squirrelled away applications in folders of your own choosing the Lion installer can get a little confused. Beyond that the only obvious compatibility issue is the death of Rosetta and with it the end to support for PowerPC applications. If you still need to rely on them you’ll have to stick with Snow Leopard for the time being.

Conclusion

At £20.99, upgrading to Mac OS X Lion makes sense but with its many new features and changes, it feels like things start to get complicated once that ultra-easy installation process is over. If Snow Leopard was Apple grooming an established product to get the best from it, Lion often feels like it’s been thrown into a room full of funhouse mirrors. You have to rewire your brain to get used to the new approach and may even need to switch off some of its most jarring features. Ultimately though, this is still an excellent OS with lots to recommend it. AirDrop and Versions are worth upgrading for alone and Apple is bound to smooth off some of the rough edges with its next update.

Installation
The idea of installing software to use one of Google’s services might sound a bit foreign, but in the case of Music Beta by Google it’s a necessity. Upon receiving invitation to the service, you’ll need to click the welcome link in the email to accept the offer. Hidden on the bottom of the page is a curious bit of information:

“Music Beta is free for a limited time. Music Beta is only for legally acquired music.”

Does Google plan to offer a monthly service fee to use the service in the future? Will the fee be based on the size of your music library? Only time will tell, but just remember you’ve been warned. Getting back to the installation, by now you should have accepted the terms and conditions and been given the option to add free songs to your Music library. There’s 16 genres to choose from covering everything from Jazz to Country and even Reggae.

At this point it’s time to install a small piece of software, Google ‘Music Manager’. This software is your one-stop-shop for keeping your music library synchronized whether that be inside iTunes, Windows Media Player or simply a folder on your computer. ‘Music Manager’ has no preference so long as you direct the application to the appropriate location of your music files.

Now that you have selected the location or program you use to manage your music on your computer, ‘Music Manager’ will begin uploading your library. Depending on the size of your collection this can take hours or possibly even days. To avoid clogging your bandwidth, inside the Advanced settings tab there’s four upload speeds to choose from: Slowest (128kbps), Slow (256kbps), Medium (512kbps), and Fast (1024kbps). ‘Music Manager’ will run in the background and gradually upload your library. Additionally, you have the choice of letting ‘Music Manager’ automatically or manually upload new music added to your computer, delivering complete music synchronization.

Installation complete, but how do we use it?
Using Music Beta by Google requires one of two things: an Android 2.2+ or higher device (smartphone/tablet) or a web browser. If you’re an Android user simply open the Google Music app or downloaded the latest version from the Android Market. Once open, go into the setting and make sure the Google account you used to activate Music Beta by Google is selected. Once you complete this step your library will begin to appear on your device.

If you aren’t part of the Android community you’ll need to head to music.google.com and log in. After logging in you’ll be presented with a slick web interface that allows you to listen to your music at ease. All of the usual suspects are presented: playlists, sorts by songs/artists/albums/genres, and instant mixes. Since the entire service is synchronized, whether you’re using a smartphone/tablet/web browser, playlists created on your Android device will be accessible from the web browser and vice versa.

Sounds good, but how well does it work?
In real-world usage, Music Beta by Google performs like a champ. We tested the service over both a 3G and WiFi connection — both delivered excellent results. The only notable difference is that over WiFi you can begin scrubbing through your current track in a matter of seconds verse minutes on 3G. Of course, this is all dependent on your data connection. Since a picture is worth a thousand words let’s just take a look at a video preview of Music Beta by Google:

Wrapping it all up
Music Beta by Google could be the game changer Android needs to capture the iTunes crowd tied to iPhone. If there was one feature we’d love to see incorporated it would be Podcast support. Being able to subscribe to Podcasts would complete the service and we’d no longer need a data cable to synchronize with iTunes. Yes, we know podcasts can be downloaded with third-party applications, but a single Music application is the dream here.

If Google can maintain the service in its current state (free), Music Beta is a sure-fire winner. Now it’s time for Apple to respond. Will Apple’s iCloud service be able to compete with Music Beta by Google? We’re not sure, but we can’t wait to find out.

Coming Soon | Google | Free

Taken of its own accord, the BBC iPlayer Android app gets the job done, and by and large it does it well. It’s a quick, free download, and once you’re in, you’re presented with a visual layout of the featured, most popular and favourite (As chosen by you) shows under both TV and radio.

On our Google Nexus S, it was buttery smooth and very fast rolling between all of these, and a small drop down tab lets you rifle through categories, by channel, as well as see an EPG of live BBC channels you can tune into – previously Android users would have to used the TVCatchup.com Flash website to stream live TV. As ever with Android, you can also search for shows by both text or voice.

Best Android apps of all time: Top 100

Dig into the settings and you can set a parental lock for content if you don’t want your kids watching adult shows – though be aware they can skirt around that easily through the website.

More interesting is the option to change the video streaming quality: by default it’s on 500kbps, but those with HVGA screen Android phones might want to try the lower 400kbps instead (visually they don’t look all that different). What is strange however is that the high quality 800kbps stream simply wouldn’t open on our Nexus S, and actually caused it to crash or run dangerously low on memory. We’re not sure if this is meant for tablets or even more higher power phones – we’ll try it out on the LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix when we get a hold of them.

Visually, on the 500kbps stream, the BBC iPlayer Android app looks just the same as when watching it through the browser: there’s the same decent framerate and on screen pause/play controls. For those worried about the space the app takes up on precious internal storage (Nexus One owners, we know your pain), the good news is the BBC iPlayer app only takes up 704KB of space, and can be moved to the SD card.

The problem is that other than the speedy interface, it brings little new. You can only watch over Wi-Fi, it only runs on Android 2.2 and up phones that support Flash and other than monitoring your favourites, everything it offers is already available through the browser.

In fact, the BBC have taken away more than they’ve given. This is no substitute for BeebPlayer, the unofficial app that tapped into the non-Flash video feed of shows to play video on even Android 1.5 phones, which it clamped down on last year.

So, a respectable start for the BBC iPlayer Android app, but we wish it hadn’t taken a Flash approach, and we’ll be much more interested if or when show downloads arrive in future updates.

We’ve been able to try out the full Skype Android app over the last few days on an Android 2.1 Motorola Milestone here in the UK, and you’ll be pleased to know that it works pretty seamlessly. However, Android really seems like the platform Skype should have used to go to town, free from the petty and arbitrary stipulations of say, Apple, and show just how great mobile VoIP can be.

Best Android apps of all time: Top 100

To the pros first. Set up is really quite simple: log in once, and up pop your Skype contacts, ready for you to call. You can also hunt out who in your Google contacts is connected to Skype and have their usernames drop right in too.

Visually, it looks just like Skype, with the bright background and clunky but perfectly functional answer/reject buttons and so forth, and the UI makes clear sense. You’ll find four tabs on the top of the Skype Android app: contacts, calls, My Info and events (You can add credit from My Info), and a long press of a contact brings up options for Call Skype, Call Mobile, Chat, Show Profile and Add To Favourites.

Skype text chat works flawlessly, with new messages appearing in the notification bar, though there’s no video chat, and the Skype app isn’t a deadly battery drainer: it ran in the background of our Motorola Milestone without any visible detriment to battery life, springing back to life to receive incoming Skype calls.

Over WiFi, the call quality on the Skype Android app is nothing short of phenomenal, and certainly vastly superior to ol’ fashioned GSM calls. Talking to people on Skype laptops was a joy, though of course helped by the Motorola Milestone’s impressive speaker.

Check out our Best Android phone Top 5 here

But (here come the cons) things still go horribly wrong in the way only Skype calls can when reception is less than stellar. Calls made over 3G were passable, but more worrying is the ability to make and receive calls in areas of just GPRS reception. Our call recipients all reported us sounding like we were underwater, trying to do an impression of an Oxide and Neutrino record, and conversations were completely impossible. As much controversy as there was around Skype for iPhone originally only running over WiFi, there’s something to be said for Skype blocking calls in 2G areas at least: it’s futile even trying.

This we’re pretty much used to over Skype on mobiles, but more disappointing are the bugs and slight lack of ambition Skype has shown with the Skype Android app. The company’s overlooked a few glaring bugs in the Skype Android app, including a glitch which doesn’t let you trigger an email for a forgotten password from the app itself, despite there being an option to – because the Android browser isn’t supported. Whoops.

See our Best Android apps shortlist now!

And more disappointingly, the Skype Android app doesn’t weave itself into the fabric of Android like we hoped. You can’t place a Skype contact on your Android desktop, and Skype calls don’t appear in the native Android call log. And while you can call out to a mobile number from the Skype app, we’d love to be able to call out to a Skype contact from a regular contact too.

Skype says contact syncing support is included, and as you can see from these screenshots, the option does indeed appear in the Android settings: however, we found that logging in led to a screen with Skype’s logo and nothing more, where it hangs, and nothing happens. Skype says it’s considering adding a “Loading” warning to the screen, and it certainly should, though we’re not convinced that that was indeed the problem: we left it for a long time, and still saw nothing change.

Ultimately, the Skype Android app delivers the experience you’d expect, on another platform. For making international calls, it’s a no brainer, but we do think that the app needs a few bug tweaks. Hopefully Skype should deliver them promptly, then begin tighter integration with the Android dialler. We’re waiting patiently for someone to come along and remove phone numbers – rather than names – from our phonebook altogether, but judging from this, that day is still a long way off. Care to step in, Facebook?

The Skype Android app is available free on the market today for Android 2.1 phones and above – however, we have not yet confirmed if QVGA support is provided. Let us know in the comments if you’re seeing it.

There once was a time when families would gather expectantly around the goggle-box of an evening to enjoy their daily offerings of light entertainment, but with the emergence of super-fast broadband internet connections and arrival of on-demand services such as BBC iPlayer and 4OD, such quaint occurrences are becoming a thing of the past. TV today is very much a case of what you want, when you want it.

It’s into this increasingly competitive battleground that Virgin is launching its Virgin Media Player service. Like the other online portals currently doing the rounds, it essentially allows you to watch television shows whenever is suitable for you. The key difference here is that Virgin’s challenger pulls together content from several different broadcasters, meaning you don’t have to have to endure the spectacle of multiple media players fighting each other for your attention.

The catch is that in order to use the service you have to have signed up with Virgin’s XL TV package, as well as their broadband service. Assuming you can tick the boxes on both of these counts, then a whole ocean of televisual ecstasy awaits your hungry eyeballs.

Running the service from your PC is easy – you just visit the dedicated site and key in your Virgin Media email address and password. Thankfully our test machine was already bang up to date, but you may find that you need to upgrade your installed version of Adobe Flash Player in order to get the ball rolling. Regardless, it’s the work of minutes.

Once you’re in, you’re presented with a several options. You can select a popular show from the ones highlighted, browse the A-Z or consult your playlist. This last option is another reason why Virgin Media Player is unique – you can create your own schedule of programmes tailored specifically to your tastes.

There’s plenty of content to pick from, as well. If you’re a fan of classic telly then Taggart, The Darling Buds of May and Captain Pugwash will undoubtedly be ever-present in your playlist. Thankfully for more modern tastes there’s The Life and Rhymes of Snoop Dogg, Jack Osborne: Celebrity Adrenaline Junkie and Primeval, not to mention the dubious charms of Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men.

However, unlike rival services SeeSaw and YouTube TV Shows, you can’t watch programmes that have been shown very recently, so there’s no catching up on the implausible events in Hollyoaks or finding out who got evicted in Big Brother. By far the most glaring (though understandable) omission is the complete lack of BBC content, so dedicated coach potatoes won’t want to delete the web link to iPlayer just yet. Virgin promise more content in the near future, though.

Playback quality through Virgin Media Player varies dramatically from show to show. More recent programmes tend to look sharper, but older shows suffer from bothersome pixilation. To be honest the same issues blight both BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, so it’s hard to be too critical.

There’s another added bonus for those of you that also have a Virgin Mobile as well as the aforementioned TV and broadband packages — you can watch an hour’s worth of shows a day from the palm of your hand. If you don’t have a Virgin phone, you can still join in with the fun for just £1 a day. Sadly we didn’t have the opportunity to test this portion of the service but from experience we’d imagine that a fairly powerful phone will be required to get anything approaching half-decent performance.

The Virgin Media Player is currently in beta testing and more channels and programmes are promised when it eventually launches for real. The lack of BBC shows is irksome, but aside from that the concept is solid. Bringing together streams from multiple providers in a single sleek and unified interface is an excellent idea, and the easy-to-use playlist option takes the pain out of planning your evening’s entertainment.

If you’re already under Virgin’s wing then you really have nothing to lose by trying out Virgin Media Player. It’s not worth switching TV and broadband providers for – after all, it’s not like exclusive content is on offer – but its convenience certainly could be a deal clincher if you’re already undecided about which service to subscribe to.

Google rolled out a new service to Gmail users that will let them make free calls to US numbers and international calls at reduced rates earlier this week.

The service is currently aimed at US customers but, as we discovered yesterday, Google accidentally gave international Gmail users a taste of what they are missing. Google says it’s switched it off again but you can still trick it by changing your language settings to US English.