After dragging its heels on Catchup TV, Seven has blown the other commercial networks out of the water with Plus7.

I'm the first to complain when Network Seven screws over viewers of shows such as Lost, so it's only fair I should praise the network when it does something right. Seven's Plus7 Catchup TV service has been online for a few weeks and it certainly puts Nine and Ten's efforts to shame.

Plus7 doesn't just provide a handful of local shows, "highlights" or TV shows broken up into painful 6 minute clips. Plus7 actually has full episodes of all the big shows you actually want to watch, such as Lost, Heroes, Cougar Town, Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs and Desperate Housewives. You've got the option to watch episodes full-screen and the quality is surprisingly good. Each episode has a Seven watermark on it and the video pauses sometimes to screen an ad - there's only three or four per show but you can't skip them because they're not actually part of the main video stream. It's still far less painful than trying to watch shows on free-to-air TV.

Episodes tend to go up on Plus7 the day after they screen on free-to-air and stay online for 7 to 28 days depending on rights. If you happen to miss an episode of your favourite show, Plus7 is certainly a viable alternative to the BitTorrent channel.

The occasional advertisement aside, I'd say Plus7 is a worthy competitor to the ABC's iView. The icing on the cake would be unmetered content deals with a few progressive ISPs such as iiNet and Internode - fingers crossed. It's services such as Plus7 - which give the viewers what they want in an easy-to-access format - that are the networks' best hope in the fight against file-sharing.