BBC iPlayer comes to iPhone
At the end of last week, the Beeb’s iPlayer passed a significant landmark: it is now available on a portable device for the first time.
If you’ve read the headline, you’ll know that the portable device in question is Apple’s iPhone, but even without that advantage you could probably have guessed from the BBC’s utter lack of originality when it comes to naming its player that a similarly i-prefixed product was the obvious first port of call.
Interestingly, the BBC’s development team opted not to use the new Apple SDK for the iPlayer. Nor are the programs going to be played in Flash format, currently the most popular means of distributing video content on the interwebs. Instead the iPlayer streams in H.264 format and you’ll need to have your Wi-Fi connection fired up because poor old EDGE ain’t up to the task by itself.
We’ll either have to wait for the inevitable 3G iPhone to be announced or for Auntie to enable downloading as well as streaming before iPlayer has a shot at true roaming playback.
The program is currently still going through final testing so the quality might be lower than the final version and there’ll be less content to browse. However, early reports suggest that both the picture and sound quality is surprisingly high which is good news.
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