The BBC iPlayer

Something else which happened during my break from this blog was the full launch of the BBC's iPlayer. I wasn't expecting my usage of the new initiative to have been transformed by Youtube. At launch the player streams from almost any browser (I haven't tested in PC Safari) but only downloads programmes in Internet Explorer.

However, due to two years of Youtube usage, I haven't been bothered with wasting time or hard drive space downloading a programme from the iPlayer at all. I've been content to stream the desired programme on my backup machine. If anything, I've made sure that I've sat down and watched whatever television I really wanted to see, when on the big screen, because it's hard enough finding the time to watch back the non-BBC television I record, even with the luxury of zipping through the ads and keeping American shows down to 45-50 minutes and half-hour comedies at 20-25 mins.

The fact that whatever you'd watch on the iPlayer would be widescreen is useful for the factual programmes which used to have their own bbc.co.uk/ offshoots in a 4:3 panel but its full screen mode's best suited to smaller flatpanels. Up close, the encoding is necessarily naff, even on a quality CRT. It's best left to a window.

My only criticism of the iPlayer is that the Corporation should stop pretending that you can watch every single BBC Programme on it when individual decisions are taken as to which repeats it will include of programmes made before the utility's launch. The Cult Of... series as shown on BBC4 is one such programme. Even when the 60s/70s programmes under examination hailed from the BBC, and the actors were filming new pieces to camera, thereby making the clips show a totally Beeb creation, they were not in the iPlayer listings. Presumably someone in the BBC, once again, deemed science fiction as not cool enough to have any audience that wished to see quality.

Hopefully, decisions like this will not become the norm and it's heartwarming that specialist and popular programming such as Top Gear still receives a widescreen repeat on TV, whether or not it's received an iPlayer trail for the week. It's good to see the licence fee go to letting us see the majority of repeats available for watching anytime. If the programmes fall into the "radio-with-pictures" bracket and the camera work is not a selling point of the show (who'd bother with series one of Coast or Planet Earth in a comparatively small window?), that's where the iPlayer really comes into its own.