BBC iPlayer calls up iPhone

chris

The BBC has made it possible for owners of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch to view programmes from the iPlayer. The Beta launch of the service took place on Friday.

Writing on the BBC Internet blog, Anthony Rose, the BBC’s Head of Digital Technologies, said that devices had been divided into two categories: “those that include a web browser (iPhone, Nintendo Wii, Nokia N95, etc) and those that don’t (Apple TV, Xbox, most mobile phones, most home media servers, etc).”

This means the BBC is able to get the video-on-demand service up and running on devices like the iPhone, before Apple TV and the Xbox, by providing the audio and video streams in a format supported by the media players available on that device. “We started with iPhone because it is the device most optimised for high quality video currently available,” said Rose.

For the iPhone BBC has created 516Kbps streams (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio).
A launch for the iPlayer on the Virgin Media cablenet is due early in the second quarter.