Online TV - BBC iPlayer Launches

So at the end of July the long awaited BBC iPlayer was launched to much fanfair (in one corner) and wailing (in another). It's actually not a real launch as promised but an extension of the long running (almost as long as TIOTI's) beta programme with potential users having to sign up and wait for a beta login.

And it's with the logins we shall begin, because that's what you're going to spend quite a lot of time doing, with the beta requiring a login to get to the site, a separate BBC.co.uk login required to get inside, another to go and download the installer (only prompted once you've possibly been poking round the catalogue site for ages, rather than one big 'install and go'). Getting there?

Nearly. The installer is a just a bit picky when it comes to matching up pre-installed Windows Media versions, DRM certificates you may have already, and other components. We had no luck with our regular PCs but got it to work on a clean XP SP2 set up first time. I'm sure you have one sat right there just for this purpose too.

Still, over 120,000 people have downloaded the iPlayer in the first week. The BBC estimates that it will have gotten 500,000 downloads in its first six months, accounting for 11% of all catch-up and simulcast viewing by the year 2011, no doubt the iPlayer will be in a very different form by then. Right now, it's an odd beast.

The iPlayer (or iMP back then) was first announced in 2003, run as a limited trial in 2004 and 2005 spending 2006 in regulatory purgatory. Now, between 2004 and 2007 a couple of big things emerged, both handling TV shows "unofficially" - Bit Torrent became very popular, with half of all BT traffic being TV shows; in parallel YouTube, DailyMotion, Veoh and gang began streaming decent enough quality video instantly (something previously considered far too expensive).

So iPlayer, being based on a 3-4 year old strategy, has emerged into a market that found it's own ways to access content and is looking just a bit pointless right now. Time for a bit of a rethink, before it leaves beta perhaps.