The BBC’s iPlayer getting an official full-scale launch may not sound as immediately exciting as that of, say, BBC HD, but in many ways it is actually the more interesting of the two to a fair chunk of our beloved population. Anyhow, whether you care or not, 25th December is the day upon which the iPlayer officially leaves Beta, and also marks the start of the consumer marketing.
If I was feeling cynical I could imply that this will basically amount to a few minutes worth of adverts followed by a series of complaints from an increased number of Vista, Mac and Linux users wanting to use the iPlayer and finding themselves unable to do so. All is not lost though as Adobe and the Beeb are partnering up to offer a streaming service which will work on non-Windows XP operating systems with the same 7-day time limit on catch-ups.
On the download front, the time limit on BBC-supplied video files is still 30 days, which is fair enough if you ask me – for one, if you haven’t watched the program by then you probably weren’t that interested in it anyway and second, it’ll be on BBC3 every other hour by then anyway. Supposedly the iPlayer now offers over 25 programmes a week which isn’t to be sniffed at. If you don’t have a clue what this iPlayer thing I’m talking about is then shame on you and why not check out the link below?
Source: BBC iPlayer site
