BBC updates Iplayer
THE BBC HAS LAUNCHED a public beta of its wildly popular content-on-demand service, Iplayer, alongside the current offering.
The biggest change to the new beta is that radio shows, rather than sitting within the individual station's mini-site, have now been fully integrated into the main Iplayer area.
Navigation is now simpler with programming separated into channels on the front page, and better use of categories rather than ranking programmes by popularity.
New features include bigger playback windows, the ability to resume the play of part-watched programming and a TV schedule. The player will also remember the last ten programmes you watched.
Unlike many other on-demand TV services in the UK, including those from ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, Iplayer works with live streaming on pretty much every platform including Linux, OSX and even the Nintendo Wii. Downloading content is another matter but the BBC assures us that it is working on this for non-Windows computers.
It seems likely that the new service will continue to be massively popular building on the 100 million downloads it served up in its first six months, and further raising the ire of ISPs which have attributed massive increases in bandwidth load to the online telly pioneer. ยต
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
I don't know if it's just while it's in beta, but the new larger videos are of lower quality than the smaller ones.

I did wonder whether they were simply using the new beta user interface to play the existing smaller video files, which are then resized by the Flash player, but I think the drop in quality is too much for that. Watching videos in full screen on the current iPlayer looks better than the new beta in full screen.
As some brits may not be aware the iplayer detects your IP and via that your location and won't serve videos to foreigners, which is all good and well for brits in the UK but what if a british taxpayer is located out of the country for business or work or even the army/navy/airforce/diplomatic service? Perhaps some sort of login is an idea?