The BBC's flagship online TV service is being launched, offering viewers the chance to download their favourite programmes from the last seven days. For director general Mark Thompson, the launch of iPlayer is as big a milestone as the arrival of colour TV. But others have questioned how technically reliable it will be and whether it is late to a crowded market. At launch, a fixed number of people will be able to sign up, with the numbers increasing throughout the year.
The iPlayer allows viewers to download a selection of programmes from the last seven days and watch them for up to 30 days afterwards. In the UK, Channel 4 offers a similar service, called 4OD, for programmes across its portfolio of channels. Viewers interested in the iPlayer can register for the service on Friday and will then be invited to join. The number of users will increase over the summer, before a full launch in the autumn.
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The iPlayer allows viewers to download a selection of programmes from the last seven days and watch them for up to 30 days afterwards. In the UK, Channel 4 offers a similar service, called 4OD, for programmes across its portfolio of channels. Viewers interested in the iPlayer can register for the service on Friday and will then be invited to join. The number of users will increase over the summer, before a full launch in the autumn.
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Plus what is the interface like, is it like a time line for the week going back (something like the radio times website) where you can double click on any show and have it start streaming in a timely fashion...?
Basically what I'm asking is... is this worth dicking around with the dreaded "kservice" when there are perfectly good (morally legal) torrent websites which do this only much better.....???
The other thing is that, presumably because it's P2P, you have to download the program before you can watch it. The program I'm currently downloading is 133MB so not exactly on demand, I guess over 30 minutes on a 8mbs connection from the speeds I'm seeing.
One big plus point for me is that it just worked whereas I tried Channel 4's 4OD last night, the installer errored, their site errored and didn't manage to watch a thing despite spending an hour or so trying.
Last edited by m.keeley on 27 Jul 2007 - 21:09
www.joost.com
Nice.... I don't see why they cant give them money from our taxes instead of making us pay for it upright I think everyone would be more happy about that, and they could probably lower the cost as everyone who pays taxes would be paying towards the BBC funding. So from £131.52 it could go down to something like £80 of our yearly taxes..
Just a thought.
Also of note Sky and Channel 4 have been serving content online for a long long time, both commercial companies and they offer it free I mean if a company can do it so fast why couldn't the BBC which supposedly have our best interests at heart?
1. Download and install IE7Pro
2. Open the IE7Pro options page, and change the Useragent string to 'Internet Explorer 7 on XP', and restart IE7.
3. Go to the iPlayer homepage, register, wait for the acceptance email (might take a day or so), then download iPlayer and install.
4. Follow the instructions for registering with the BBC etc.
5. Find and download a TV show. I found that it can take a little while for the download to begin, but I put that down to the servers being quite busy at the moment.
6. Once the show has downloaded, play it. A new window will popup and show a 13 second BBC advert. Stop it before it completes, otherwise you'll get an error message that can only be cleared by logging-off. Near the bottom of the window is a link something like 'Play with Media Player', click this, sit back, and enjoy.
I hope that when the BBC finally gets the other versions out properly (official Vista/Mac/Linus etc) that it looks into things like integration with Windows Media Center (i.e. download from within WMC), and maybe also XBox 360/PS3. That would be killer.
Last edited by Slugsie on 30 Jul 2007 - 10:52
I want to try it out!
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