BBC iPlayer
Friday, 14 December 2007. Television.
The BBC has just released a new streaming service for their BBC iPlayer service. Up-until now, my experiements with the BBC iPlayer have been disapointing at best.
I got an invite to test the Beta back in the summer, but sadly iPlayer is Windows only, so I was unable to run it on my super quick iMac and had to boot up my XP Laptop. After many wasted hours trying to register the application, upgrade Internet Explorer, upgrade Windows Media Player, downgrade Windows Media Player (long story), login, login again, and wait for a download that never happened. I wasn't impressed. When I realised that not only did the program fail to download, but had it successfully downloaded- it would've been rendered useless by crippling DRM seven days later. I gave up.
But cry no longer! The iPlayer has been upgraded to allow you to stream video, (YouTube style), so now the iPlayer is available to everyone, Mac, Windows or Linux.
As it is a streaming service, there is no way to set up series links, or download the program. On the subject of downloading, they appear to have got round the YouTube video downloading trick in Safari that was rather useful.
The BBC service is only available in the UK, and is similar to the US service Hulu, which has such names as NBC Universal and News Corp behind it. I am guessing that Sky might launch a similar version, alongside the Sky Anytime service, (News Corp being the parent company of Sky). Again, I have a beta for Hulu, but it is only available in the US, and as yet I have failed to find a proxy that manages to get round it.
Terry Pratchett
As a final comment, it was reported on BBC News yesterday that Terry Pratchett has been diognosed with a rare form of early Alzheimer's disease. As a Pratchett fan since junior school, this is distressing news. I have only every met him once, but I was completely star struck. As yet, we don't know if the condition is immediately life-threatening, and he remains optimistic and plans to continue writing.
Hopefully it will be a long time off before I have to trudge solemly down to Waterstones and purchace Terry's Salmon of Doubt.
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