Well the BBC opened up the beta for the new iPlayer a few days ago, I signed up for it on the day it came out and got accepted yesterday. I’ve been excited about it for a while, the idea of on-demand BBC programming is a very nice one in my mind. Having given it a bit of a spin I guess I can talk about it a bit.

When I was accepted I got an email telling me my username and password, which are both rather awkward and pretty much impossible to remember (and I think impossible to change). I headed to the website on IE (since its not firefox or any OS other than XP friendly) and logged in, through what seems like a bit of a strange pop-up box similar to what you get when logging into FTP. I had to run a few activeX controls but it seemed to be working.

When it came to downloading the first show I first had to download the library which is the part of the program on my computer which manages all the downloading and viewing of the material. After dealing with some connection problems (Firewall etc) I finally got into downloading the first show. It was kinda difficult to tell whether it was actually doing anything though as everything seemed very inactive for a while. You don’t get any info about your kb/s or how many peers you are connected to (it uses P2P technology, presumably to lower strain on the BBC servers) so its difficult to know whether its not working or whether its just slow.

As well as the snails pace downloading my computer had basically ground to a halt as well and I couldn’t really do anything. I tried to close the iPlayer but it wasn’t working. I just got pissed off and reset the computer and didn’t start it back up until a while later. When I did start it up I was pleasently surprised to see that the first of the shows had finished and the others were getting there.  This is pretty strange considering that the program hadn’t even been running but I guess it was a blessing really.

At this point the app seems to be quite clunky and slow but otherwise ok after the original crushing of my computer responsiveness. To be honest I think the whole system needs a complete re-write as it seems completely incompatible with other browsers and operating systems in its current form. The BBC are getting a lot of flak for having it only available for windows XP users and although I didn’t think it was such a big deal since they have basically just targeted the biggest demographic to get it ready sooner the way it seems to operate doesn’t seem to be very multi format friendly. Ultimately it needs to turn into something a bit more like Joost, with no need to go fiddling around in IE to download the shows. I think this will make it easier to put it across different formats and hopefully make the application a bit better in itself.

I just finished watching last weeks episode of mock the week, which I missed. The iPlayer uses windows media play to play the shows, its not exactly the greatest player ever made but it works and I’m familiar with it, which is something.  At the moment the iPlayer is a bit bare and clunky but I’m hoping with time it will turn into something more enjoyable to use.