Hands on with the BBC iPlayer

The BBC claims it has had 17 million views of TV shows on its iPlayer application.

You've got to hand it to the BBC, the British state broadcaster has adapted to the digital age well creating a user-friendly online platform to showcase its wealth of good programmes.
In December, the BBC iPlayer was finally launched giving people in the United Kingdom the chance to stream via the internet or download BBC programmes up to seven days after they have aired on free-to-air TV. In its first seven weeks of availability, iPlayer has served up 17 million programmes, according to the BBC.
Rather disappointingly, the service isn't available in New Zealand - your IP address is used to ascertain where you are logging on from. But the BBC suggests on its website that an international version of the iPlayer is in the works:
"Rights agreements mean that BBC iPlayer television programmes are only available to users to download or stream (Click to Play) in the UK. However, BBC Worldwide is working on an international version, which we will make available as soon as possible."
What you are presented with when you log on to iPlayer are two ways of watching BBC programmes on-demand - at a time of your choosing rather than when the shows screen on TV.
In London for a few days, I've had the chance to test out both the streaming and download models and have found the service overall to be very user-friendly and pretty good in terms of quality. I just watched the BBC crime drama Ashes to Ashes as a video stream connecting to iPlayer over a Wi-fi connection.
The feed was stutter-free and the image blown up to fill my laptop screen was perfectly watchable. I was able to skip forward through the show from the outset.
Streaming the BBC content means you don't have to ait for it to download - the quality isn't as good streaming, you occasionally see audio out of sync with the picture and some pixilation, but it's instant digital viewing without the need to own a digital video recorder.
Interestingly, TVNZ is embracing this viewing model for is TVNZ OnDemand portal, which shows its confidence in streaming over broadband and even dial-up connections in New Zealand.
Brits on broadband connections may prefer the download option for playback of shows. Here you use the iPlayer Download Manager, a 5MB application you download and install to manage the interaction with the peer-to-peer network that's used to grab the content from other downloaders, speeding up the process.
As with any peer-to-peer network, the more people that are downloading a show, the faster you're likely to get it. As such, an episode of the BBC's no-nonsense Hardtalk current affairs show only had a few P2P sources and took around an hour to download at 22Kbps.
Never Mind The Buzzcocks on the other hand had 23 sources and download speeds ranged from 7Kbps to 117Kbps. The 160MB file took about 38 minutes to download.
The download service is one area of BBC iPlayer that has attracted a bit of controversy. That's because it is only available to people running Windows XP and Vista and uses Microsoft's DRM to protect the BBC content. Apparently downloads for Mac users will be made available later this year, but the move by the Beeb to employ Microsoft's DRM (digital rights managment) system has annoyed many in the UK. People can stream the content from any PC using a web browser.
But once you've downloaded a show, which can be played back in Windows Media Player 10 or 11 or the BBC iPlayer software itself, it's easy to see the advantage of taking the time to wait for the download. The quality is better and you can watch it offline. Couple iPlayer with a new gadget like the HTC Shift ultra-portable computer and you've a nice way of watching programmes you've missed while taking the train or bus to work.
In fact, the BBC just did a deal to also make its shows downloadable from Apple's UK iTunes store for a cost of 1.89 pounds per episode. That makes iPod and iPhone viewing a reality, though one enterprising hacker has come up with a simple way to allow iTunes content to be played on any device by circumventing DRM measures.
Anyway, why pay per episode when the free, official alternative through iPlayer is perfectly fine anyway? I think iPlayer sets the bar for broadcasters pretty high when it comes to dishing up content in the online format.
Shed the DRM aspect and it would give consumers a great measure of flexibility when it comes to playback on devices, but I doubt the Beeb or its content providers will be going down that route soon, despite the DRM work-arounds proliferating.