We’re already big fans if the BBC’s iPlayer service, so our bottoms almost squeaked with excitement when we heard that the Beeb is to start offering high definition streams and downloads of selected programmes.
The iPlayer has grown to be a true smash-ban-wallop hit, registering more than 387 million streams or download requests since launching on Christmas Day 2007.
If you hadn’t noticed(!), today is iPlayer day.
The BBC Internet blog is covered in posting from various of the BBC bloggers, so many, that they run way over the front page.
Anthony Rose, Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, Future Media & Technology (blimey he must have a wide business card!), who oversees iPlayer, has recorded a video (not surprisingly playing in an iPlayer viewer).
He goes over his history with iPlayer and then projects forward into features and functions that he’d like to see incorporated into iPlayer in the future.
iPlayer 3, as it’s being labelled, will be available Q1 or Q2 in 2009 and will incoporate social features.
How wrong The Times are in their piece praising Ashley Highfield, entitled “Business big shot: Ashley Highfield.”
To label him as the man behind the launch of the BBC iPlayer, misleads their readers.
Ashley might have been the person who stood himself up for interviews, giving the impression that he was the man behind it.
The real accolade for originating the concept of iPlayer and carrying out the original work behind iPlayer falls to Ben Lavender, someone no longer at the BBC.
BBC iPlayer is further expanding the hardware platforms that it’s available on – the last was a troublesome iPhone launch.
The latest is the Nintendo Wii, announced today, bringing the advantage that the iPlayer content can be viewed on a ‘normal’ TV, rather than on a computer screen.
Just when the BBC were pleased to tell everyone that they’d fixed the hole in their iPhone iPlayer service that let people download TV programmes without DRM – the very next day, the originator of the hack, Paul Battley, produced an update to get around the BBC’s fix, re-opening the whole.
BBC iPlayer is coming to the Apple iPhone.
The BBC iPlayer service, that lets UK TV licence players watch selected piece of content that have been shown on TV in the proceeding fourteen days, is going to be usable and playable on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch using WiFi connections.
We and other publications have been reporting that the BBC iPlayer has been taken up in large numbers by UK TV License payers.
We’ve experienced something that other individuals might, one that will have serious implications for the long term success of BBC’s heavily-promoted service.
Media analyst spods Screen Digest have released updated usage data and forecasts for the online TV market in the UK.
The company say that a “surge” in punters feeling the downloading love for the BBC’s iPlayer catch-up service has sent them scurrying back to their labs and adding some more 0s on the end of estimates for free-to-view (FTV) TV consumption in the UK.
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One of the (many) complaints that people had with the BBC iPlayer was that their processing power and bandwidth was being used even when they didn’t have the iPlayer application loaded.
While some of the more technically minded might have known that this would have been the case by default, the majority – and let’s not forget that this is a service aimed at the general public – had not clue about it.
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As expected, BBC