iPlayer plays catch up

The concept of BBC iPlayer’s ‘catch up service’ is great. It allows you to download the previous weeks TV to your computer. Of course if the previous weeks programs were all rubbish you wont really want to, so it will be interesting to see how popular the new service that launches on Christmas Day will be.

As you would expect the BBC has been talking the service up:

“It could turn out to be one of those rare moments when television, suddenly divorced from linear channels, changes forever.”

I guess that if you had spent £100 million over two years on a project aimed at becoming the nations “digital campfire” you would be sounding upbeat as well. Getting to this point has been somewhat traumatic for the BBC:

• License-fee payers who choose to use niche computer operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux rather than Windows vociferously demanded the iPlayer treat them equally.
• The BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, was obliged to conduct a lengthy “market impact assessment” that delayed the whole project for months.
• Internet service providers continue to worry loudly that the strain placed on their networks by people downloading hours of programming to their computers via broadband will be immense.

Via [Telegraph]