The new TV3 app is currently flying high in the App Store paid charts, yet is its standing justified? JOE downloads away to give you the full lowdown.

By Emmet Purcell

Just where does all our hard-earned RTE licence money go these days? Hiring D-List misfits for the latest series of Celebrity Banisteoir? The useful but slightly incomprehensive RTE player, which essentially doubles as a Home and Away viewer?

Our public service broadcaster can't even sort out HD versions of its stations, for crying out loud. As Ireland's first independent commercial broadcaster, TV3 has grown from humble beginnings in 1998 to their latest milestone, an RTÉ Player-alike video app. Have the Ballymount broadcasters came up trumps?

To be fair, TV3 have clearly put a lot of effort behind their app, which is a cross between the mix of news and stories of the Sky News app and a video 'catch up' service. During our fiddle with the application, we experienced no bugs or download errors and every portion of TV3's service was draped in the station's signature reassuring purpleness. As we submitted our application to the app-only Lady Gaga competition, we began to feel quietly optimistic over Dublin developers FuriousTribe.com's efforts.

Aside from competitions the app features a showbiz news section and regular news section. The news section initially looked up-to-date and allows users to flick between news videos (literally news briefings from the night before) or sports videos (which generally consists of reaction video rather than actual sports highlights). It is disappointing, however, to see the latest news updates broken into such short snippets and quite worryingly, the 'sports videos' have not been updated in five days as of this writing.

Good old crazy Lindsay can liven up any app

Of course, the reason the TV3 app is sitting high in the app charts is the promise of catching full episodes of 'Xpose, Ireland AM, The Apprentice, Tonight with Vincent Browne and more' on their handset. Surprisingly, the 'more' mentioned in TV3's publicity blurb is merely The Morning Show and Midday, bringing the total of shows available to users to a disappointing six. Anyone expecting to catch up with Champions League highlights or the latest episode of Glee should temper their expectations.

In many ways, the TV3 app feels like a work in progress - although it's great to see a catch up app available for iPhones in Ireland, some basic flaws severely hamper ones enjoyment of the service. For one, why are all videos, even tiny files, only available via WiFi access? Or why is there so much more content available on the TV3 website's catch up section alone, rather than both content being easily available for both mediums?

There is clearly a lot of potential to be found with a catch up service such as TV3's app but with so little content currently available, we would advise most users out there to consider a purchase with mild trepidation and watch App Store reviews carefully to see if the station and app developers are paying attention to customer feedback. On the other hand, if you absolutely must have Xposé and Vincent Browne content on-the-go, no matter what - we certainly aren't going to stop you.