ESRI world imagery raster layer not working in Python Console

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Have been using the usual code in python console to use the world imagery layer as a base map and have been pretty happy with this, from IEQGIS page

qgis.utils.iface.addRasterLayer("http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer?f=json&pretty+true","raster")However, just stopped working...error msg below

It has been superseded by a plugin but can't find a way of getting this to work either. Any ideas why this does not work or which URL to put in the REST API?

Error message: Invalid Layer GDAL provider: Cannot open GDAL dataset http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer?f=json&pretty+true: Invalid dataset dimensions : -2147483648 x -2147483648Raster layer: Provider is not valid (provider: gdal, URI: http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcG...d_Imagery/MapServer?f=json&pretty+trueAnother more recent error:

GDAL provider: Cannot open GDAL dataset server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer?f=json: `server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer?f=json' does not exist in the file system, and is not recognised as a supported dataset name. Raster layer: Provider is not valid (provider: gdal, URI: server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer?f=json

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