And I complained about the iPlayer (which incidentally is brilliant on the iPhone).

I noticed the ITV Catchup on TV last night and thought I’d give it a try as looked to be cross platform. As it turns out it may or may not be depending on the availability of a Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Against my better judgement I installed it and gave it a try.

Immediate disappointment.

Audio and graphical glitches, and OMG, how poor is the video encoding. Did they use the lowest setting? Its unbelievably poor. I was going to give it the benefit of the doubt with the glitches as its Beta on the Mac and all that but I’m reliably informed that it does that on Windows too.

Ok, so we don’t get downloads (yet) on Mac with the iPlayer but that aside; come back iPlayer, all is forgiven.

Just look at the artefacts on this screen shot…

An old article but non the less worthy of a posting especially as its from the BBC. The very same BBC that is championing DRM in the iPlayer, doing a great job pointing out the futile uselessness of DRM.

Go figure.

Great.

The thing is we have become so accustomed to the level of presentation offered by SKY that the BBC’s quality of presentation was often duller that the football on display. I think that the BBC should take a look at themselves and realise that people prefer to be entertained rather than have a two dimensional journalistic report on the match, and if that match is a bit flat then it is their job to make the viewing enjoyable.

Result – 5/5
Quality of Football – 3/5
BBC Commentary – 1/5

That’s the only words that you can use for the BBC’s iPlayer offering for Mac users. It’s obvious that while effort and expenditure has been put into the Windows version the Flash streaming option is nothing more than a sticking plaster. A solution to get them off the hook of their responsibilities to licence payers who choose not to use Microsoft operating systems.

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.