REPORTS ARE circulating that the Beeb has got into bed with Finnish firm, Nokia, and enabled the world's leading handset manufacturer to build its Iplayer technology into an N96 handset.

The rumours follow extensive trials of a mobile version of its Iplayer downloader which was previously available as a beta here but now seems to have disappeared. The INQ certainly couldn't download it.

Actually, offering a handset friendly version of Iplayer – which enables UK citizens to download TV programmes and radio shows they've missed – has long been on the cards.

As long ago as March [2008] owners of the Apple Ithingey were able to watch a restricted set of programmes on their phones.

Then last month, August, the Beeb announced that it had improved the quality of its video streaming codecs to support more handset friendly technologies such as H.264 and AAC+ codecs.

Previously it had employed VP6 compression to stream content since it worked well at low connection speeds.

A report by Mobile Computer magazine says the software will be downloadable from here. Presently that doesn't work just the previous beta version, it doesn't seem to exist yet.

It's seems logical to suppose that the Iplayer will eventually be built into a whole range of Nokia handsets but the choice of the N96 is a tad unfortunate.

The N96 is the obvious successor to the N95 but it is also viewed as something of a Ithingey killer. So much so that O2 has decided not to bother to 'range' the N96 as it might impact its Ithingey sales.

Consequently Brits will be able to view the TV programmes they've already paid for on one particular mobile handset as long as they're not on the O2 network.

Isn't the Beeb supposed to be unbiased or something? µ

L'INQ
Iplayer