Winter is coming – tell the BBC
I’ve just checked. Winter officially starts on 22nd December 2007 at 6:08 GMT. This means that, apart from Christmas being around the corner, the BBC have less than a month to meet the promised autumn release for the iPlayer. It remains ominously quiet and all the usual disclaimers about Macs not being supported remain on the iPlayer home page. I’m sure that there is plenty of chat and speculation on the forums but I’m purposefully giving that a wide berth firstly as I don’t want to allow myself to be drawn in to angry posts (I’m frustrated enough), and secondly I’m interested to watch the horizon through the ‘official’ channels such as the BBC news site and the iPlayer site itself.
Of note I saw an article yesterday on the BBC news site that revealed plans for TV rivals including the BBC to form a joint on-demand service. There was no mention of supported platforms although I find it beyond belief that they could consider anything that isn’t multi platform especially when none of them have their own house in order and have been criticised openly for it.
edit – I’ve just noticed while trawling the sites for links in the above post, a FAQ entry on the iPlayer site that suggests the solution that will be put in place for Mac and Linux users is streaming through Flash. It hardly seems worth it.
I wouldn’t mind having BBC programmes on youtube or something similar. It would be an easy way to catch up on a programme that you’ve missed. You really don’t need to see Eastenders or Holby in HD quality if you just want to know what happened last week. What I don’t want is something that I have to install that runs a P2P file sharing service with restrictions on when and how I watch the programmes. If there are too many restrictions on material then there is no incentive for people to use the BBC player rather than just downloading from torrents as they do now.