The BBC enters the "iWorld" with a beta version of its on-demand TV service, iPlayer on 27 July. It will be only available to UK licence fee payers and will offer programmes from BBC TV channels to watch on the PC. Users will get access to programmes for up to a week after broadcast and they then have 30 days to watch it. After viewing, the file deletes itself from the computer.
Later this year, iPlayer will become widely accessible with links from YouTube with many others such as AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Bebo planned. It also hopes to expand to handheld devices such as mobile phones.
Again we now see technology convergence between the PC and the TV and home entertainment worlds. Imagine the home of the future with everything supplied on demand music, films, video, audio, TV, news, information and eyes books. All through one infrastructure and fully interoperable and downloadable, to any device. “Some may say I am a dreamer…”
The iPlayer was developed by the BBC's Future Media & Technology division in partnership with Siemens and Red Bee Media.
