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Since last week, Benn has been raving on about the BBC iPlayer on his iPhone, but what is it?…

BBC’s iPlayer is their online on-demand TV service, which allows users to download or stream any BBC content which has been broadcast during the last 7 days, and watch it on their computers – or in Benn’s case his iPhone. As it’s the BBC, the iPlayer is free to use. It uses peer-to-peer technology for the download service, so that content can be downloaded from the nearest point in the network and not always directly from BBC servers.

The iPlayer first came out in summer 2007 but it didn’t have its proper launch until Christmas Day 2007. Within the first 7 weeks of the launch, 17 million programmes were streamed or downloaded and recently over 500,000 programmes were streamed or downloaded in one day! In January, around 2.2 million people used the iPlayer.

The iPlayer website has recently had a facelift to add extra functionality – the 10 most popular programmes, ‘Last Chance’ for programmes about to expire, and ‘Recently Added’, which is updated every 10 minutes! We think that the iPlayer really shows how hard the BBC is working to build up its online and digital presence. Over the past year the BBC has signed deals with IBM, YouTube and Apple’s iTunes and it has recently announced that it will be collaborating with ITV and Channel 4 on a shared on-demand TV service called Kangaroo.

However, since its release there have been a couple of issues with the iPlayer. When the download version of iPlayer initially came out, it only worked on Microsoft Windows XP and many people were unhappy about it excluding a significant number of people not using XP. In response, the BBC has consistently said it wants to offer a multiplatform iPlayer and has already made the download version compatible with Vista, with a Mac version promised by the end of 2008. The BBC also has plans to broaden access even further, making it available on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

There has also been concern expressed from broadband networks, about the sheer volume of traffic that iPlayer will ultimately generate. Tiscali suggested that content producers like the BBC should be made to pay to fund broadband network upgrades to prevent it from crippling them and Ofcom has said there is the possibility that the ISP-content provider business model may need to change in the future to fund the huge growth in digital content.