The new site is in public beta right now - you can try it out at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer - where it will dual-run alongside the existing iPlayer site while we get your feedback, fix bugs, and add the remaining features that didn't quite make it into the first beta release.

But before looking at the new site in detail, I'd like to take a step back and try to explain the design challenges we were trying to solve and the solution we came up with (or, if you'd like to skip the background story and head straight to the list of new features, scroll down to features in detail below).

BBC iPlayer: the story so far

• designing a platform capable of handling our rapidly growing traffic
• ensuring that content became available in iPlayer as soon as possible after it aired on TV
• providing the best possible video quality
• improving the reliability of video delivery, including failover between content delivery networks, adaptive bitrate for people on lower bandwidth connections
• dealing with massive peak loads - the so-called "Top Gear effect" when 100,000+ people descend on the iPlayer site directly after programmes like Top Gear and Doctor Who finish on TV

One issue that we needed to solve when delivering content across so many devices and platforms was that in some cases we only had the right to make certain programmes available on, say, PC platforms but not mobile or TV platforms. Additionally, the media files for each platform take different amounts of time to encode, which means that we need to deal with situations where a programme is available on some platforms but not others.

This meant that we couldn't make the same version of the iPlayer site available on each platform. That would mean people on mobile devices might get offered links to programmes that are not available on that device, giving an error when you clicked to play the programme. So we introduced a concept that we called Actual Availability, which allows the iPlayer publishing system to offer independent content sets - we call them Media Sets - to different devices.

BBC iPlayer V2 has proven a trusty workhorse, successfully scaling to 1.5 million users, 15 million page views delivering over 1.1 billion(!) minutes of video each month across more than 40 different devices and platforms. You can see the list at https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/iplayer/where_to_get_iplayer/.

A new iPlayer: the design challenge

At the highest level, the fundamental problem that the iPlayer design team was trying to solve was "As people begin moving from television to the web, what happens to the role of the linear TV scheduler as the tastemaker?" Let's be clear: we are not there yet. Although iPlayer traffic is doubling each year, it still only accounts for 2-3% of linear TV viewing. But something seems to be stirring. Let me explain:

When you turn on your TV in the evening peak viewing hours and idly flip through the available channels, the programmes that you see are carefully chosen by each channel's scheduler. He/she picks the programmes that you can see, and since most of the country watches TV each evening, the scheduler is the leading tastemaker. By scheduling a particular programme at peak viewing time, the scheduler is both creating and satisfying the desire to view that programme.

Now, today iPlayer does a fine job of satisfying the time-shifted desires created by the scheduler: the BBC schedulers create the desire to watch a programme; iPlayer lets you see it at a time that's convenient to you.

But what if you no longer watched linear TV? Who becomes the tastemaker then? Right now this is a largely theoretical problem as very few people watch no live TV at all. However, for a small but growing number of people this is indeed the case, and the fundamental problem that I sought to address was "who becomes the tastemaker for such people in a world without schedules?"

Now I use Twitter periodically during the day to monitor what iPlayer users are saying about the service - "thank god for iPlayer", "waiting for Doctor Who to arrive", "iPlayer slow today", etc. - Twitter is a great early warning tool for spotting problems. But increasingly I began seeing Tweets from people saying "Watching ", "Loving Charlie Brooker on iPlayer", etc. I began clicking on those links, and found myself watching more programmes in iPlayer than I would have by browsing. In other words, for me, the Twitterverse is becoming the tastemaker.

Looking at developments across the industry in this space, it's clear that I was not alone. Particularly in the world of YouTube where there is no master scheduler who can shape demand. The tastemaker is rapidly becoming your friends.

Separately, our iPlayer stats told us that, while our users really liked the service, most only came back every week or two when they had missed a programme on TV - clear evidence that linear TV created the demand while iPlayer satisfied it. In order to get more users to iPlayer, we needed to make iPlayer something more than TV catch-up alone - we wanted it to become a driver of demand, so that you returned to iPlayer daily to see what new programmes were there just for you.

The question then is, in a world which cannot be driven by schedulers, who or what will play the role of tastemaker? Well, we think that's going to be a mix of things that your friends recommend, things that our servers recommend based on what you've watched, things that you tell us you like, as well as the linear scheduler, whose selections continue to matter to an important part of the online audience.

So, if schedulers are going to be augmented by your friends as drivers of consumption in the future, the challenge for the team was to integrate friends and social into the iPlayer site, and to do so in a way that doesn't alienate people who aren't interested in this kind of thing. Sure, it's easy enough to sprinkle Share, Recommend, Digg, Follow, etc. buttons across the site, but social shouldn't be a prerequisite to participation or add complication or clutter for those who just want to get going. It's about giving more choice and control.

The iPlayer design team thus found itself with a major challenge: Take a popular and mainstream product, and reinvent it so that it becomes not just a place you go to catch up on programmes that you know you missed, but to become the place where demand is both created and satisfied. Oh, and to do that in a way that doesn't make the site more complex, and in a way that delights both early adopters and the mainstream audience. Make it personal, make it social, and keep it simple.

Challenge #1: Making the site personal without creating a separate 'you' site

Initially we decided to create a new area of the site called My iPlayer, which would be your personalised place to find all your favourite programmes. But it became apparent that creating a My iPlayer page, separate from the rest of the site, would mean separate user journeys and duplicated content between the main site and your personal site. In the end we dropped the concept of a separate personal site and instead folded your personal experience into the fabric of the main site - something that will become apparent as we look at the features in more detail below.

In short, we sought to add a large range of personalisation and social features to iPlayer, making every feature part of a coherent whole, and avoiding adding anything that didn't have a clear purpose.

Challenge #2: Integrating social connectivity

1. press the Recommend button on your site >> activity posted on Facebook or Twitter
2. on Facebook or Twitter, see activity, click link >> go back to the site hosting the recommended content

That's great if you want to use social networks to increase incoming traffic to your site - which is nice - but that detour via an external 3rd-party site seemed to us to create a disconnect between the user pressing a Share or Recommend button and getting the reward for that action. And we want it, above all, to be seamless and simple.

Our thinking was that in order to create a lively social recommendation scene, we needed to make the recommendations and social graph visible within iPlayer, in addition of course to any external activity.

Additionally, we wanted to allow a single click of a Recommend button to post activity to both Facebook or Twitter (or any other network or micro-blogging site for that matter) where appropriate, in addition to posting that activity into our own activity streams.

The solution we came up with was to create a BBC login - known as BBC iD - which users can then connect with Facebook, Twitter or any other social network that we choose to partner with in the future, allowing us to create the following social recommendation ecosystem:

1. press the Recommend button in iPlayer >> activity appears on your friends' iPlayer home pages >> AND activity posted on Facebook AND/OR Twitter
2. on Facebook / Twitter, see activity, click link >> watch it in iPlayer

Basically, we use your external social graph to connect you with your friends within the iPlayer site, and make it scalable for other BBC Online services in the fullness of time. To do this, we connect Facebook, Twitter and where appropriate other social networking sites to your BBC iD login account, providing you with a single gateway to multiple social graphs and a single Recommend button that can post activity to multiple social networks.

The new iPlayer: features in detail

Some of the features listed below didn't make it into the first beta release and will be added over the coming weeks (features that are 'coming soon' are noted in italics below).

1. Favourites

The great thing about Favourites in the context of iPlayer is that by simply adding, say, QI as a favourite, every time a new episode of QI goes to air, your favourites list will update and reorder itself to show the new episode. Adding items to your favourites takes only a single click, so I found myself spending the first 5 minutes on the new iPlayer site simply looking for any series that I liked and clicking to add it to my favourites. I now have - as can be seen in the image above - 48 items to watch right now, with the iPlayer servers constantly scanning for new episodes becoming available, adding them to my favourites, and very shortly sending me an email notification.

Now that I have so much stuff to view, I can almost ignore the rest of the iPlayer site and simply rely on Favourites to give me a constant stream of things to watch.

2. Roaming

But... if you do choose to sign in, then all your favourites and other settings can roam across all the devices on which you use iPlayer. For example, we're planning on updating the mobile iPlayer site - the one you can access on a range of mobile phones - to let you access your Favourites as well - here's an image of Favourites in the new Mobile iPlayer site:

So now if I'm bored sitting in a train on the way home, I can look for new programmes to watch, add them to my Favourites, and when I get home they'll be right there on my home PC ready to watch.

Full roaming is coming to the mobile iPlayer site shortly - the initial implementation contains local favourites only.

But what will make this good service great is when we can synch up your BBC iD with your TV or mobile, so you can pick up where you left off on whatever connected device you have - the team are working on this now and we hope to say more about this soon.

3. Personalised iPlayer home page

We wanted to create an iPlayer home page that feels almost more like an application than a traditional web site, making it a familiar place you return to frequently for your favourite comedy, drama, music and more.

Here's how it works:
When you come to the iPlayer site as a new user, you're presented with a nice simple promo zone at the top of the home page that contains the Featured and Most Popular zones that would be familiar to any existing iPlayer user:

Now, as soon as you've played a couple of programmes, our recommendations system has enough information to guess what you may like and offer personalised programme recommendations for you, and so when you next return to the iPlayer home page you'll now see two extra zones: For You and Friends:

Now here's where the personalisation comes in: you can slide open any of the drawers to turn the iPlayer homepage into the tastemaker of your choice. For example, if you'd like your viewing to be driven by programmes that the BBC editorial team has chosen, simply slide open the Featured drawer:

Or, if you're so inclined, sign up on the site, then connect iPlayer to your Facebook and/or Twitter social graphs, and you'll get a steady stream of recommendations from your friends:

These sliding drawers will remember the state that you left them in, allowing a single iPlayer home page to meet the needs of a mainstream audience looking for editorialised recommendations, through to users who look to their friends as the tastemaker.

Remembering the open/closed state of each of the drawers is being added shortly.

4. My Categories

5. Better live TV

and we've also created a new Live Viewing page which allows you to easily view all the BBC TV channels in iPlayer:

6. New radio console

7. Recommend to friends

As mentioned above, you can link the Recommend button to the social network(s) of your choice via a single BBC login, and our servers will constantly check your social graph on those sites and import latest friends additions and deletions across all your networks.

8. Watch with friends

Here's how it works:
On all TV playback pages in iPlayer you'll see a button to add the IM chat widget to your iPlayer pages. If you're a Messenger user and this is of interest to you, click the Get Started button.

After signing in to Windows Live Messenger with your Messenger credentials, you'll now see an extra panel that shows which of your Messenger contacts are online and in iPlayer right now:

Separately, while you're watching a programme, anytime you're feeling excited about that programme or even just a particular moment in the programme, you can shout about it to your Messenger friends - simply type whatever comes to mind into the text box and hit the Shout button - all your Messenger friends who are in iPlayer right now will get the message, and may then choose to sync their iPlayer to yours and join you to watch and chat together.

By the way, your shouts only go to your Messenger friends who are in iPlayer right now - they won't go to contacts who are not in iPlayer - so you don't need to worry about spamming contacts who don't live in the UK or who aren't interested in your shouts of "It's the Stig!" or whatever.

The Messenger that you can add to your iPlayer site is a JavaScript implementation of the Windows Live Messenger client - i.e. your private chat conversations travel over the same MSN network as regular Messenger IM chat.

Watch with Friends is being added to the site in the next few weeks - stay tuned!

9. Better video quality

This new adaptive bitrate system, coupled with Adobe's upcoming Flash 10.1 release with H.264 hardware acceleration, should give better quality, less jerkiness and lower CPU usage on PCs equipped with a graphics cards that support H.264 hardware acceleration - see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf for technical details.

10. New iPlayer Desktop

This means you a) don't have to wait to download programmes you want and b) you've got your favourite programmes already downloaded to your computer ready to view when you're offline.

Downloading whole series to your computer is easy - just click the Download button on iPlayer playback pages and choose the "Download future episodes" button:

iPlayer Desktop will now automatically download every future episode for you, including where possible downloading episodes before they air on TV, making them available for you to play back within minutes of the programme finishing on TV.

To avoid iPlayer Desktop maxing out your internet connection we've added the ability to tell iPlayer Desktop to schedule all series downloads between, say, midnight and 7AM:

Additionally, iPlayer Desktop will pause any automated downloads if previous episodes start expiring without being watched, avoiding end of month bandwidth surprises.

One of the features that I'm really liking is the new feature in iPlayer Desktop for live TV and radio too, which puts the BBC's 17 network and national radio stations....

and 7 TV stations...

...all right there on your desktop for instant listening and viewing.

10. And finally...

As in any beta there will be bugs, and we still have some features to add. This new site is a big step - and a big bet - for us, and we'd really welcome your feedback - look for the Site Feedback link at the bottom of each page on the site.

We really hope you like it. As some of you may know, I am moving on to become CTO of Project Canvas, and this is the last major piece of work from the team under my leadership. It's been quite a journey for me and the BBC since I got that call from Erik in late 2007 "Anthony, I could use your help with something" and I'm very proud of what we've created.

Please keep a lookout for additional blogs from my colleagues on how the new iPlayer site was built, the Java/PHP hosting platform that powers the new iPlayer site, BBC iD and how we connect to social networks, and more.

Anthony

Anthony Rose is Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, BBC FM&T.

• Try the new BBC iPlayer beta at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer.
• Read The evolution of BBC iPlayer on the About the BBC blog.
• The Twitter hashtag for feedback on the iPlayer beta is bbciplayerfeedback.

Good news for PS3 owners - last week we released an updated version of iPlayer that offers improved video quality and an enhanced user interface.

We first released a version of iPlayer for PS3 about a year ago. It worked pretty well, but back then the PS3 used an older version of Flash that didn't support H.264 playback and didn't support full-screen mode, which somewhat limited the playback experience we could provide.

A few months ago Sony released an updated version of Flash that provided support for H.264 content. However, that version of Flash was still unable to play back our higher quality streams at the full frame rate of 25fps.

Since then, Sony have done a great job of enhancing the PS3's Flash playback experience, and the latest V3.0 firmware update now includes hardware acceleration in full-screen mode, allowing for a substantial improvement in the playback experience.

Over the past year, we've also done a lot of tuning and enhancements to our iPlayer video encoding, including adding a new 1500Kbps "SD quality" format. Put the two together and the result is an iPlayer on PS3 with brilliant video quality - almost as good as broadcast television!

As part of the V3.0 firmware update, Sony have added a big iPlayer icon to the PS3's cross-media bar, giving easy one-click access to iPlayer:

As well as optimising the video quality, we've also optimised our "designed for TV viewing" BigScreen interface in a new larger size to take advantage of the extra real estate offered on high-def displays:

iPlayer BigScreen interface on 576p screens

iPlayer BigScreen interface on 720p and 1080p screens

By the way, you can experience our BigScreen version of iPlayer on your PC as well - just head over to https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/iplayer/bigscreen on any computer. Connect your computer's video out to your TV set and use our BigScreen interface to play your favourite programmes on demand from the comfort of your couch.

Finally, some iPlayer on PS3 tips and tricks:

1. If the iPlayer icon doesn't appear in the XMB
Some users have reported that the iPlayer icon hasn't appeared after they've installed the V3.0 firmware update, so if you're not seeing the iPlayer icon here's what to do:

• Sign up for the PSN network (it's free) using a UK address, which seems to be a requirement for getting the iPlayer icon to appear.


• Reboot (important). You should now see the iPlayer icon in the XMB.


• If you still don't see the iPlayer icon, check the serial number on the back of your PS3 - it should end with CECH-XXX3, where the "3" indicates a UK model. Only UK models get the iPlayer icon, meaning that if you purchased your PS3 abroad or through a retailer that imported non-UK models then you won't get an iPlayer icon.


• If the iPlayer icon still doesn't appear, don't worry about it - you can get exactly the same iPlayer experience by launching the PS3 browser and going directly to the iPlayer site at https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/iplayer

3. Turn off the screensaver
By default the PS3 screensaver kicks in after 20 minutes, dimming the screen right in the middle of your favourite programme. So you might want to disable the screensaver: Settings > Display Settings > Screensaver

Over the coming weeks we'll be adding some extra functionality and fixing a few glitches in the UI.

User response to our new iPlayer for PS3 has been amazing. Although it's less than a week since we launched, iPlayer on PS3 now accounts for a massive ~10% of all iPlayer viewing, overtaking Mac (8.5%) to be our 2nd most popular platform for IP-delivered content. We'll have to wait and see whether this holds up in the coming weeks, but this enthusiastic reception makes it clear that users do want iPlayer on their TV - something that bodes well for Canvas and other IPTV propositions.

Anthony Rose is Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, BBC FM&T

If only you could send them a link that took them directly to the exact moment in the programme...

Well, now you can, thanks to a BBC iPlayer feature we recently introduced which allows you to create links that jump directly to any time within a programme.

For example, I loved Steve Hughes in Michael McIntyre's brilliant Comedy Roadshow - see him here: https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/i/lbtbg/?t=16m51s

You'll notice that the above link is nice and short, making it perfect for Twitter posts or pasting into an email. We created our own "short URL" system to save you the trouble of having to use a 3rd-party service, and also to ensure that your users see a trusted bbc.co.uk link instead of one of those obfuscated short URLs that could take you anywhere.

To use this new functionality, just click the Programme Information link below the video playback window in iPlayer to reveal the new Send to a Friend options:

The new direct link functionality is available at the moment for iPlayer TV programmes. We hope to add support for radio as soon as we can.

PS: Remember Mr Collins from the BBC's Pride and Prejudice all those years ago? Well, while watching our new Psychoville production I was amazed to see David Bamber reprising his Mr Collins role - see for yourself: https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/i/l9n18/?t=21m29s

Anthony Rose is Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, BBC FM&T

Internet video used to be, and for the most part still is, a grainy, lower quality version of the video that you're used to seeing on your TV, and subject to stops and starts that you wouldn't expect or tolerate from broadcast television.

The good news is that today BBC iPlayer takes a major step to address that quality gap, with some programmes now available in HD, and all programmes now also available in a new SD-quality stream that's pretty close to TV quality. As of today, iPlayer's standard definition video quality should be as good as most Freeview channels, plus you'll now be able to stream or download BBC programmes in high definition without need for a set top box.

Along with the introduction of these new higher quality formats, we're also adding a new larger video playback window, adding adaptive bitrate technology to automatically deliver the best quality video that your internet bandwidth can support, and adding a diagnostics page that lets you easily test your internet connection speed.

Finally, we're taking our cross-platform iPlayer Desktop download application out of Labs and ending our use of peer-to-peer technology.

It's a major release, the most significant since the current iPlayer site went live in July last year. Much of the new technology in this release sits 'beneath the hood', so let's take a look at the new features in more detail:

iPlayer goes HD

Good news for those with fast computers and fast internet connections: BBC iPlayer now delivers some of your favourite BBC programmes in HD. The HD proposition in iPlayer follows the HD content availability on the BBC HD channel, so we're starting with about 40 hours of HD content per week, which will grow over time.

HD has been a long time coming to iPlayer, so you might be interested in the back story:

We first began investigating HD in iPlayer over a year ago. The BBC HD Channel quality controllers have high standards and insisted that for us to label content as "HD" it had to be true HD - i.e. 720p or above with no obvious encoding artefacts. No cheating (as some other video sites do) labelling anything upwards of 800x600 as HD - our HD needed to be at least 1280x720.

That meant using H.264 and an encoding bitrate of 3Mbps or greater (we actually settled on 3.2Mbps as our preferred HD bitrate). However, since many people won't have an internet connection that can stream 3.2Mbps reliably, we wanted to make HD available for download as well. Trouble is, a year ago our download manager was Windows-only, and we were determined to only release HD when we had a solution that allowed our Mac and Linux users to download them as well. Additionally, a year ago too few people had a version of Adobe Flash that could play H.264, which meant many users would need to install a software update in order to access our content - something we're keen to avoid.

The good news is that as of today the various pieces are in place for going live with HD: Our new cross-platform download manager allows Windows, Mac and Linux users to download HD, everyone has a version of Flash that can stream HD, and our HD channel now has more content available.

It should be noted that glitch-free HD playback requires a fairly recent computer with a decent graphics card - older computers won't be able to handle the CPU-intensive decompression & rendering and may drop frames, leading to jerky playback. To get the best HD experience always play back in full-screen mode, and if you don't have enough bandwidth to stream try downloading instead.

So, look for the new BBC HD Channel in iPlayer, then go full-screen to enjoy the HD quality. Or, why not take this opportunity to connect your computer to your (HD-capable) TV set and enjoy HD on a nice big screen.

Note that HD programmes are about 1.5 gigabytes per hour of video, so you might want to check your internet package, particularly if you're on a 3G connection, to see if you're on a bandwidth-capped plan and, if so, how many hours of HD content you can stream or download before you reach the monthly limit for that plan.

New resizable media player

Back in December we introduced in iPlayer Labs (the testing ground for new iPlayer ideas and features) the ability to change the size of the video playback window.

iPlayer Labs users told us via their feedback (which we hugely value and which influences our product design decisions) that they loved the idea, asking overwhelmingly for this feature to graduate from Labs. In Labs we tested three video player sizes - you told us that the smallest and largest sizes hit the spot.

So today the ability to resize the video player window graduates from Labs and is available to all iPlayer users.

New high quality 1500Kbps video format

Finally, BBC programmes should look as good on your computer as they do on your TV, even if you don't choose the HD option.

If you select the new large video window size, iPlayer will automatically switch to using our new 1500Kbps 832x468 video format. When you switch to full-screen mode, iPlayer will continue to use the 1500Kbps stream for a playback experience that's close to TV quality.

Programmes that you download using iPlayer Desktop will now also use this new 1500Kbps format, making downloads now close to TV quality as well.

Regular video streams get a boost too

In addition to introducing a new 1500Kbps SD quality format, we've also shifted our default video quality up a notch, so that our existing High Quality (800Kbps H.264) format now becomes the default used in the smaller video playback window size. For programmes without fast movement played back on a small computer screen the quality of that 800Kbps format is pretty good, which means that as of today our baseline video quality takes a big step up.

Adaptive bitrate, phase one

You might be thinking... the baseline stream has changed from 500Kbps to 800Kbps... what if I don't have enough bandwidth to stream 800Kbps (or for that matter our new 1500Kbps streams)?

The good news is that this iPlayer release also includes the first phase of our adaptive-bitrate technology, such that iPlayer will now automatically switch to a lower bitrate stream if it detects that you don't have enough bandwidth to play the preferred version. For example, if you're happily playing the 1500Kbps stream when your partner at home also decides to watch an iPlayer programme on their computer and you don't have enough bandwidth to support both streams, then iPlayer will automatically drop down to 800Kbps, and then down to 500Kbps, as needed.

In this first phase of our adaptive bitrate system, once iPlayer has dropped down to a lower bandwidth stream it will stay with that lower bandwidth version for the rest of the programme you're watching. Over the coming months we'll enhance that behaviour to allow iPlayer to automatically ramp up and down between available versions every few seconds to match your available bandwidth.

For users on bandwidth-capped internet connections or who otherwise might want to override the adaptive bitrate system and use only our lowest bandwidth (500Kbps) stream, we've provided an option to do so (right).

New internet speed diagnostics page

With the availability of our new 1500Kbps and HD streams we thought it a good time to add a diagnostics page to help you see what bandwidth you're getting from your ISP, and also help us better understand average bandwidths that our users are getting, including allowing us to analyse the bandwidth available from different ISPs by time of day, etc.

Our new diagnostics page - https://bbclatestnews.pages.dev/iplayer/diagnostics - looks at first glance similar to others you may have seen at speedtest.net and elsewhere, but it's significantly more sophisticated than other speed test sites we've seen.

Most speed test sites measure the speed taken to download a small file over HTTP. That's a good number to know if you're trying to measure your HTTP download speed, but what we and our users are more interested in is the ability to stream an iPlayer programme - and that means measuring RTMP streaming protocol speed, and from the specific locations where our servers are located. Accordingly, our diagnostics page performs a total of four tests: The first tests the download speed from our BBC web site servers, the next three tests measure the Flash RTMP streaming speed from each of three major content distribution networks (Akamai, Level3, Limelight), giving us excellent visibility into overall network throughput and allowing us to shape future design decisions accordingly.

iPlayer Desktop out of Labs

Three months ago we released iPlayer Desktop, our new Adobe AIR-based cross-platform download manager. Initially we made iPlayer Desktop available to Labs users only, allowing early adopters to try it out and give us feedback.

Many thanks to all those Labs users who sent us valuable feedback - we read them all - you'll find many of the bugs you mentioned have been fixed, and many of the ideas and suggestions have either been incorporated into the latest version or are on the to-do list for future release.

Today iPlayer Desktop graduates out of Labs, replacing our existing download manager as our new cross-platform download platform. Windows, Mac and Linux users can now download iPlayer programmes, including in HD, for offline playback.

As of today, we're no longer using P2P to distribute our content, or use your upload bandwidth- all content is now either streaming or direct HTTP download from our servers. If you're a user of our existing BBC iPlayer Download Manager, you can continue to use it to play back files that you've previously downloaded, but all new downloads will be via iPlayer Desktop, so feel free to go ahead and uninstall BBC iPlayer Download Manager (look for that entry in Add/Remove Programmes). Note that Sky Player and 4OD use the same Kontiki technology as our existing BBC iPlayer Download Manager, so if you've installed their download managers you may find that some shared Kontiki components remain after uninstalling ours.

Download to view on your TV

Although they've not yet caught on in a big way, Windows Media Extender devices provide a way to play back downloaded movies and songs on your TV set. Made by companies including Linksys, D-Link, NetGear and Zyxel, plug one end of these devices into your home network (or connect via wi-fi) and the other end into your TV set and/or audio system, and you can then browse and play files shared on your home network by any PCs running Windows Media Centre. Many of these devices have HDMI outputs,1080p upscaling and SP-DIF audio output to your 5.1 system, providing a high-quality way to play back downloaded programmes on your TV.

User feedback told us that a popular use case for downloading iPlayer programmes was to play them back in Windows Media Centre or via these Windows Media Extender devices. We have good news for these users: We're now making those same WMV files available for direct download, with no need to install any software - just look for the More Downloads option (right), then download the file, save it to your desktop or Windows Media Centre library, and play it out as you wish, including moving it around your home network, playing it back on other devices in the house, etc.

Now working on... iPlayer 3.0

Over the next couple of months we'll have a few more iPlayer releases with additional features, but the iPlayer team is now focussing on the next-generation of the iPlayer site - we call it the iPlayer 3.0 release - coming this summer - though it's early days it's looking really exciting - stay tuned for more info as development progresses.

Anthony Rose is Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, Future Media & Technology.

We've ported iPlayer to iPhone, Wii, PS3, Nokia N96, Sony Walkman, Virgin Cable and all the other gadgets and devices at "where to get iplayer" - what's the next big thing?

Our marketing team identified breakfast television as an emerging market segment for on-demand viewing and asked the iPlayer team to see if we could come up with something new in this space.

After months of top-secret development and testing, and many burned developers, we're finally ready to bring iPlayer Toaster Edition out of labs.

The iPlayer Toaster Edition looks at first glance like a regular toaster, but with the front panel sporting a 7" 1280x800 OLED display.

The touch-sensitive display is protected from the heat by special thermal insulation located behind the front panel. Device power consumption is a very eco-friendly 2 watts... until you hit the Toast button, when it rises swiftly to 2000.

The iPlayer Toaster Edition features built-in wi-fi, allowing you to stream your favourite BBC iPlayer TV and radio programmes direct to the toaster front panel. Audio is provided by two heat-proof speakers cunningly concealed within the toaster slots, which has the added advantage of shaking the crumbs off the toast - this feature can also be triggered either by the Shake link in the UI.

In keeping with the small form factor and 7" display, the UI makes use of our so-called "bigscreen" display, which is ironically optimised for small screens:

(The BigScreen version of the iPlayer UI is also available for PC - see it here

The built-in USB port is compatible with most portable media players, allowing you to transfer downloaded BBC programmes to your media player while your bread is toasting. As soon as your toast is ready, butter it, unplug your media player, and you're good to go with food and media on the move.

Our marketing team keep telling us about the importance of branding, so the iPlayer Toaster Edition can optionally burn the iPlayer play button logo into the toast using our new HD (High Darkness) rendering mode:

Another cool feature is the Digital Retraction Mechanism (DRM) which automatically withdraws and shreds any uneaten toast after 7 days. Initially the retraction mechanism was only compatible with some types of bread, but after criticism from organic bread consumers we managed to develop a full cross-comestible DRM.

Developing the iPlayer Toaster Edition has been hot and demanding work and our test team is glad it's done - frankly they've had it eating burnt toast, even though they did manage to catch up on the entire MasterChef series.

Anthony Rose is Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, Future Media & Technology

N.B. Editor's note - readers may be interested in other significant developments in media and technology today.

Today, we're really pleased to announce that BBC iPlayer downloads are now available for Mac and Linux as well, thanks to our new Adobe AIR-powered download manager, which we've named BBC iPlayer Desktop.

(click images to enlarge)

To the best of my knowledge we're the first major content provider in the world to offer DRM downloads to PC, Mac and Linux platforms. Getting there has been quite a journey - here's the story...

Why do we need DRM?

In the past we've been criticised for using DRM. Surely a public service broadcaster has a duty to make its content available for free, forever, without rights restrictions, to all UK users. Unfortunately, much as we share those aspirations, the reality is that we have to use DRM, for two reasons:

1. As part of the Public Value Test undertaken by the BBC Trust, a decision was made by the Trust that the BBC could only make iPlayer content available for 7 days after broadcast, or, if you downloaded a programme, that you could keep it for up to 30 days, or 7 days after first playback. This was in response to industry concern that allowing people to keep programmes forever would lead to a reduction in sales of DVDs, etc. The ability to provide this 'timed availability' for downloaded programmes requires Digital Rights Management - i.e. DRM. So, for this reason alone, any download solution that we provide requires DRM.

2. Our rights holders require that we protect their content, at least one reason for which is to allow them to sell that content in other markets. For example, BBC Worldwide generates around one billion pounds in revenue annually, much of which is from sales of BBC programming in other territories, on DVD, etc. Some of that revenue flows back to the BBC public service, offsetting license fee requirements. Additionally, US movie studios often mandate use of particular DRM technologies as a condition for licensing their content. Accordingly, making our content available without any rights restrictions, freely downloadable worldwide, would affect the ability of those rights holders to monetise their content in other markets, hence an additional requirement for DRM.

Which DRM?

The BBC was widely criticised for choosing Microsoft DRM, which we chose for the initial iPlayer launch, and have been using since. Various conspiracy theories abounded, but the simple fact was that at the time Windows Media DRM was the only viable digital rights management solution around. It was sufficiently robust, accepted by rights holders, free (some DRM solutions have hefty license fees), fairly easy to use, and worked on 90% of computers.

Since then, we've embarked on a long and arduous journey to find the perfect DRM solution, one that would work on all computers, would be easy to install, would be supported by a reputable vendor, would be acceptable to rights holders, that wouldn't incur significant costs to us, and that could form the basis for a next-gen download manager platform that will in due course, well, keep reading...

We evaluated a large number of DRM solutions, including some open and open-source solutions. Some offered Mac support but not Linux, others required that we make our content available in their store rather than in our web site, other (sometimes open-source) solutions appeared attractive and low cost, but require extensive development to create a tamper-resistant player and would have incurred hefty MPEG licensing fees for playback of H.264 content.

Ultimately, we chose Adobe AIR and Adobe rights management (FMRMS) as our preferred solution for our next-gen BBC iPlayer Desktop application.

So, have we 'switched' to Adobe DRM? Not quite. We continue to use Windows Media DRM for downloads to Windows Media-compatible portable media players, we Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM for downloads to Nokia mobile phones, we use Adobe DRM for downloads to PC, Mac and Linux computers, and we may support other DRM technologies for playback on set top boxes and future IP-connected TV devices.

Although it would be nice to have to support just a single digital rights technology, the reality is that when you look across mobile, PC and TV platforms there's no 'one size fits all' solution, and so we end up supporting a range of content protection technologies.

Of course none of this is of interest to the user - you just want to watch your favourite programme with as little fuss as possible - and we think that our new BBC iPlayer Desktop has gotten us a huge step closer.

No more P2P

Another big change we made is that our new BBC iPlayer Desktop no longer uses P2P. Downloads now come directly from our servers, as direct HTTP downloads.

Why the move away from P2P?

Three reasons:

1. When the BBC chose P2P for downloads over two years ago, bandwidth was really expensive, and so P2P was seen as the only way of providing a download service at a sustainable distribution cost. But over the past year the cost of bandwidth has decreased by 90%, making direct HTTP downloads a viable alternative.

2. Some users told us that they didn't like P2P - it used their CPU, used their upload bandwidth, slowed their computer. Our new solution should not have those issues.

3. In the UK, some ISPs count both download and upload internet traffic in their usage calculations, which means that some users were hitting their monthly usage caps more quickly because of P2P upload traffic. Our new solution doesn't have that issue (of course if you download lots of stuff you may still hit you monthly ISP limits - but that applies not just to iPlayer content).

It should be noted that in the technology world nothing stays still for long, and by choosing to not use P2P today we're not making a statement that P2P is either good or bad - we're simply saying that the cost/benefit right now is in favour of direct HTTP downloads, perhaps in due course served from edge caching servers deep in ISP networks. However, in the future new requirements and new P2P technologies (e.g. P2P streaming) may lead to a re-evaluation of our preferred delivery options.

The timing

Months ago we promised that we'd have BBC iPlayer programmes available for download to Mac and Linux computers before the end of 2008, and we made it... just.

Getting a solution out that worked on Mac was the easy part... having a solution that worked on Linux as well was somewhat harder. It's no coincidence that BBC iPlayer was released on the same day that AIR 1.5 for Linux was released by Adobe, as this is the first AIR release that provides DRM support on Linux platforms.

Available today to Labs users

The version of BBC iPlayer that's out today is very much a beta product, with a number of known issues that we'll be working hard to fix right after the Christmas break.

For those users who have our existing Download Manager installed, we don't want to break something that's working really well, and so we've introducing our new BBC iPlayer Desktop in Labs first. That means that it's available to anyone who has signed up as a Labs user - to do so, simply head over to BBC iPlayer Labs.

We expect to move BBC iPlayer Desktop out of Labs and make it our mainstream download manager application in February.

Upcoming developments

Right now BBC iPlayer Desktop makes use of the same 800Kbps H.264 content that's used for our High Quality streaming option. We're working on improving that, to provide 1500Kbps H.264 content that should be close to television quality. So, starting around February, we expect to deliver substantially better quality for downloads (these 1500Kbps streams will also be offered for streaming, providing near TV quality in iPlayer).

After that, we plan to use our new Adobe AIR platform to provide a range of features that will, we think, produce a really seamless online/offline, browser/desktop experience. Key features that are coming up include:

- being able to download radio podcasts
- being able to pre-book download of your favourite programmes, including whole series
- getting a popup system tray alert when your favourite programmes become available
- on-demand an live radio streaming, on your desktop.

Basically, we're looking to use this new platform to bring BBC content much closer to your desktop... which is why we called it BBC iPlayer Desktop.

Anthony Rose is Head of Online Media Group, BBC Future Media and Technology.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions

Anthony Rose, Controller, Online Media Group and Vision, Future Media & Technology discusses user testing of the iPlayer, and how he hopes iPlayer will soon revolve around you and your friends. You may also be interested in this interview with Anthony in this week's Media Guardian.

This was our first foray into TV-connected gaming devices. We didn't know what the uptake would be, so we adopted a "keep it simple, get it out fast" approach. This meant encoding our content in a format compatible with the Wii's Flash 7 video playback capabilities, but playing back within the standard BBC iPlayer website, which is really too big for the Wii screen.

In other words, we made a new video stream for Wii, but we didn't optimise the user interface for the Wii's screen resolution or Wiimote remote control.

Strategically, this Wii release was extremely important, signalling the arrival of internet-delivered on-demand services direct to your TV set rather than to your computer.

However, as a user proposition, it was very much a first-pass product, something we knew and recognised at the time. In fact, one of the reasons why we didn't create a custom Wii interface was because our user interface team was hard at work on the new-look BBC iPlayer 2.0 site, which was to launch in June.

Back then, people also wondered why we made BBC iPlayer available on Wii but not PS3. The reason is simple: there are twice as many Wii units in the UK than PS3s, plus the PS3 browser had some odd quirks which have increased development time.

Good news: we have an all-new BBC iPlayer user interface designed for the Nintendo Wii.

This release is important for us because it adds to our list of BBC iPlayer user interfaces, which now comprises:

• a mobile version, as used on iPhone, Nokia N96 and other mobile devices
• a regular version, as used on your PC, Mac and Linux computer
• a set-top box version, available through Virgin Media
• and a big screen version, now for Wii.

We hope, in time, to make suitable modifications which enable users of other gaming consoles and set-top boxes to use this user interface.

The new Wii version has a simplified user interface that presents just a few options on screen at a time and nice big chunky controls - easy to aim at with a Wiimote.

View larger version

The new interface gives access to both TV and radio programmes:

View larger version

Our users told us that, when playing back BBC iPlayer programmes on Wii, they always wanted to play back in full-screen mode, not in a window within the browser as is often done on PCs, so the big screen interface is designed with that in mind:

View larger version

Choosing the most appropriate version of BBC iPlayer for your device is taken care of automatically by our servers. Head over to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and our server will take care of the rest.

If you don't have a Wii or run the Opera browser, you can still have a look to see what it's like: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen (no guarantees that it will work with your browser if you're not on a Wii, though).

Finally, it must be noted that while we're providing an all-new user interface for Wii, the video stream is still the same video quality that we've been using since we went live back in March.

That's not ideal - but, alas, the Wii ships with Flash 7 which uses the older Sorenson Spark codec that gives lower video compression and poorer quality than the more recent On2 VP6 and H.264 codecs used in later versions of Flash found on your PC. We're very much looking forward to better quality video options on these devices - stay tuned for possible further developments on this front over the coming months.

So, if you have a Wii, why not try it out? Simply connect your Wii to the internet (you may need to also install the Internet Channel) then head over to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, then let us know your thoughts and ideas - we always welcome ideas and we try to take them into account when designing future BBC iPlayer releases.

PS: We're also working on bringing BBC iPlayer to Sony PS3, but we're not quite there yet as the PS3 uses a slightly older version of Flash which doesn't support some of the features used in our media player, and the very promising Flash 9 update now available on PS3 has some compatibility issues. Our Flash developers are working on it - stay tuned for updates.

Anthony Rose is Head of Online Media Group, BBC Future Media & Technology

Of course, BBC radio downloads and podcasts have been portable to different devices for sometime - just point your device to bbc.co.uk/podcasts and you'll get a version for iPod/iPhone, for Sony PSP and for some Nokia phones. But this is the first time that you can play BBC iPlayer TV programmes on a range of portable media devices.

Supported devices

So far, we've tested BBC iPlayer on:
• Sony Walkman E and S series
• Archos 605 WIFI and Internet Media Tablet
• Philips GoGear 52xx series
• Samsung YP-P2 and YP-Q1
• Nokia N96
See full list of devices on which iPlayer is available.

The new Walkman is tiny - which could be useful if you watch programmes on public transport, while the larger GoGear has a big, bright display.

These devices do not have internet connectivity, so we're talking about a download rather than a streaming experience. What both these devices have in common is that they support Windows Media Protected playback - that is, they support Windows DRM for portable devices, which allows us to make our programmes available for download on them.

These devices are not the only devices that support Windows Media Protected playback - others do as well, but we've tested BBC iPlayer on these devices and are happy with the user experience.

As an aside, working out whether a device supports Windows Media Protected playback may require some research on the part of the consumer. There's a bewildering number of similar-looking devices with different capabilities available in shops, and it can be hard to tell which formats are supported by any given portable media player. The packaging usually has some vague wording like "Plays your music and video downloads, including MP3 and WMV", but often doesn't specify whether the device supports Windows DRM, which is required for playing back BBC iPlayer programmes.

If you're buying a portable media player and would like a model that allows you to play BBC iPlayer programmes on it, we have made a web page, Where To Get BBC iPlayer, where you can get a list of the model numbers of tested BBC iPlayer-compatible devices. Those on this list have been tested by the BBC iPlayer team. BBC iPlayer may work on devices which are not on the list - if the device packaging mentions "PlaysForSure", that's a good sign. We'll update the list as we test more devices.

If you're a device manufacturer and you don't see your device listed, please contact us - we'll then test your device and if compatible, add it to the list.

Downloading programmes to your portable media player

Downloading BBC iPlayer programmes to your portable media player is easy: simply go to bbc.co.uk/iplayer on your PC, find your programme, and select the Download for Media Players option.

Save the downloaded programme to your desktop (or any other suitable location), plug your media player into your PC, and drag the programme to your media player. Easy.

This process is known as "sideloading" - you download the content to your computer, then sideload it to a device plugged into a USB port.

We've worked hard to make the process as easy as possible - there's no software to install; you just download the file and copy it to your media player. It should be no more difficult than copying photos from your digital camera to your computer. You can also use Windows Media Player to automatically sync downloaded files to your media player for you.

Currently, sideloading is available for Window Media DRM-compatible devices only, which also means that you'll need to do the download from a Windows PC. For our Mac and Linux users, don't despair: we have another release coming up very soon, aimed at improving your BBC iPlayer options - stay tuned for updates...

Technical details

For those interested in the technical details, we now encode all BBC iPlayer programmes in an additional file format (320x180 pixels 500Kbps video, 128Kbps 48KHz sampling audio, WMV file format) suitable for this class of portable media players.

We also made some enhancements to our DRM process to support sideloading to portable devices, including pre-delivering the license where possible (where it's not possible to pre-deliver the license at the point that you download the programme, you'll be prompted to play the file - you only need to play the first few seconds - at the time you try to copy it to your portable media player).

Getting protected media to work on portable media players has always been a challenge. Until recently, Apple was the only company that provided a seamless store-to-device user experience. Fortunately, the market is changing, and there are now some devices from other manufacturers that, with suitable workflow at the download and licensing end, can come close to matching that experience.

As part of trying to make the download experience as easy as possible, we're not using P2P for these portable downloads; the files are served as direct HTTP downloads from our servers, which means you don't need to install any software - just click the Download for Media Players link and save the file.

Downloads for Nokia N96

Separate to the above "sideloading" proposition, which is available today, our Mobile team is in the final stages of development of a download proposition for Nokia N96 devices that will also allow you to download programmes "over the air" to your Nokia N96 - i.e., to download directly from the BBC iPlayer site to your phone, without needing to download to your PC first.

These Nokia devices support Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM - so, to make BBC iPlayer content available on those devices, we've built an OMA DRM service. Accordingly, we've now added OMA to the list of rights protection technologies supported by the BBC iPlayer, which should allow us to, in due course and where technically feasible, make BBC iPlayer programmes available on a whole new class of mobile phones and other devices that support the OMA content protection standard.

Editors' note: this post originally contained a paragraph about the BBC iPlayer and the Nokia N95. This paragraph has been removed and is replaced by this blog post from Matthew Postgate which gives more detail.

What about iPhone / iPod?

The astute reader would have noticed our making BBC iPlayer programmes available on Sony, Philips, Nokia and other devices... but what about Apple?

What's common to all the devices listed above is that they support "open" rights protection technologies, where "open" means that any content owner or distributor, such as the BBC, is able to readily license the DRM technologies used by those devices and is able to create content that can be played back on those devices.

Unfortunately, Apple keeps its DRM technology close to its chest and has so far not licensed that technology to third parties. This means that as of today, it's not technically possible for us to make rights-protected BBC iPlayer programmes available for download from the bbc.co.uk/iplayer website in a format compatible with Apple devices. That's a major missing piece for us and a disappointment for Apple device owners, so please know that this has our full attention.

How do we choose which devices to make BBC iPlayer available on?

Finally, there's occasional speculation that the choice of devices we support is based on device manufacturers paying us, or a "special relationship" (whatever that means) with certain vendors. Please be assured that this is not the case.

Our device selection is done without fear or favour, based on a standard BBC "Reach, Quality, Impact, Value" (RQIV) assessment policy, where:
• "Reach" means that it will increase the reach of BBC programming (i.e., people who would not otherwise watch or listen to our programmes may now do so)
• "Quality" means it's a great user experience
• "Impact" means people who already interact with the BBC will consume more of our programming
• and "Value" means that this new proposition is value for our license fee payers.

In terms of iPlayer, the decision usually comes down to the popularity of the device and how practical (and costly) it would be to implement and support iPlayer for it.

It's worth remembering that: certain aspects of our content delivery are presently non-negotiable (for example, rights protection such as DRM is required), some devices cannot technologically support BBC iPlayer (and some that do are not geared for it and the quality would be poor) and, last but not least:

bringing BBC iPlayer to a device may require the active involvement of third parties such as the device manufacturer and our content delivery partners.

If you have a device that is not supported, and are wondering why that is the case, these considerations usually contain the answer.

This is a good opportunity to thank all the device manufacturers and technology partners we have worked with so far. The BBC iPlayer team looks forward to working with them, as well as other device manufacturers and future technology partners, to make BBC iPlayer even more widely available, and continue to improve the BBC iPlayer experience.

Anthony Rose is Head of Online Media Group, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Though not as sexy, the team also has to address the [inevitable] bug fixes. Over the past six months we added Flash streaming (Dec), added Most Popular, More Like This, etc. (Jan), and made BBC iPlayer available on iPhone (Feb) and Wii (April).

We then went quiet for a while as we built an all-new server architecture better suited to powering the types of product propositions that we look forward to releasing over the next six months.

An iceberg seen from off the coast of Graham Land in Antarctica

The first of the releases built on our new platform - the all-new BBC iPlayer 2.0 site - went live on June 25, just over a month ago.

Like an iceberg, the BBC iPlayer 2.0 site is the bit "above the water". The new site is doing well, but to me more important than the site itself is the ability that our new architecture (the invisible mass below the water) gives us to deliver innovative and world-class new features, even faster than we've been shipping them so far.

Okay, now on to the announcement: H.264.

The video you see in BBC iPlayer today is encoded using the On2 VP6 codec, at a bitrate of 500Kbps. The On2 codec (a video compression technology from a company called On2) is pretty much the standard for video delivery over the internet today. It's optimised for moderately low data rates (300Kbps to 700Kbps, rather than the 2Mbps to 4Mbps needed for HD content), and low CPU usage, allowing it to work reasonably well on older computers. In short, On2 VP6 is the video workhorse of the internet.

When we went live with streaming in BBC iPlayer back in December last year, we needed to make some decisions about the streaming technology to use. Adobe Flash with On2 VP6 codec was the obvious technology choice (it's also used by YouTube and most other video sites), because evryone already had Flash installed, meaning that nobody would need to install anything in order to use BBC iPlayer - an important criterion.

Choosing a bitrate was more difficult: too low and the resulting video quality would be unacceptably poor; too high (with corresponding higher bandwidth) and people on lower bandwidth connections would experience buffering problems - ie, pauses in playback that reduce your viewing pleasure. I think we chose well, hitting the right spot between quality and bitrate and giving a good quality playback experience, at least when playing back within the playback "window" on the BBC iPlayer web site. However, the full-screen experience was less than optimal. As the majority of BBC iPlayer users watch BBC iPlayer in full-screen mode, this is clearly something that needs to be addressed.

Enter H.264.

H.264 is a high-performance video compression technology - the new kid on the block, so to speak. It's actually been around for a few years, but only recently have a few things come together to make H.264 usable by us. Compared to On2 VP6, H.264 delivers sharper video quality at a lower data rate, but requires more CPU power to decode, particularly on older machines, and the user needs to have the latest version of Flash installed.

Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of BBC iPlayer users have it. More machines now have graphics cards with H.264 hardware acceleration. Additionally, Level3, a content distribution network (CDN) is now able to stream H.264 content to ISPs in the UK, and the content encoding workflows that we use (Anystream and Telestream) are now able to support H.264.

Actually, when I say that our content encoding workflows are now able to support H.264, that's not quite correct yet. Our compression technology suppliers are frantically working on getting the preferred MainConcept H.264 compressor into their software, something they're hoping to complete in the next week or two. In the meantime we're using the QuickTime codec, which produces results that are acceptable, but not as good. So it seems we're really on the leading edge here.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the good news for those looking for video quality improvements in BBC iPlayer is that, starting this week, we're going to be encoding our content in H.264 format at 800Kbps. Additionally, our media player now supports hardware acceleration in full-screen mode, giving a greatly improved image at lower CPU usage than before.

Along with the change to H.264, the soundtrack in our video programmes is changing to AAC+, another new compression technology that delivers better sound at a lower bitrate. The bass is deeper, the treble tighter, the overall effect is a noticeably better listening experience, particularly if you listen with headphones or hook up your computer to your TV or home sound system.

However, given that we're on the (leading) edge here, with our CDN network and video compression partners only now being able to support our requirements, we're going to play it safe and introduce H.264 in two phases:

In the first phase, starting this week, we're going to create our content in both On2 VP6 and H.264 format, and provide a button to let you choose which works best for you and your internet connection, Normal or High:

Initially, the default will continue be On2 VP6, which will remain the choice for users on slower internet connections. However, if your internet connection speed is 1Mbps or higher, try the "HIGH" H.264 version.

In the second phase, we're going to add automatic bitrate detection, so that our media player software automatically chooses the right version for your computer and internet connection speed - we'll likely introduce this auto-detection feature in September. This will make it as easy as possible for all users to get the best quality of service possible with the equipment they have.

Initially the H.264 option will only be offered to people who have the latest version of Flash installed, and will be offered incrementally as new content rolls out through our encoding chain. We'll also be making a number of tweaks and enhancements over the coming weeks as our video compressor suppliers deliver more software updates, so look out for further improvements over the next few weeks.

On a different topic, the BBC iPlayer has been shortlisted for three British Technology Awards - Best Home Entertainment, Most Indispensable Technology and Best Online Technology. The winners are determined by popular vote here. All votes for BBC iPlayer are much appreciated :)

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media, BBC Future Media & Technology.

We've just got the results back from our first major piece of audience research among BBC iPlayer users. It's great to have some solid evidence to back up our ideas on how people were using the service, and I've been delighted to see how positive people are about it.

Obviously, since BBC iPlayer launched, we've had internal server stats to tell us about levels of use and the most popular programme titles, and we have a number of tracking surveys set up to regularly measure topline opinions (as all BBC services do) from members of the public.

We also monitor our message boards to keep an eye on any problems that people are encountering, and we scan articles and blogs posts about BBC iPlayer which give us a lot of ideas and feature requests to go into upcoming site updates.

But we wanted to know more detail about the majority of our users and their habits, things that these sources can't tell us, such as:

• Do most people use BBC iPlayer alone, or do they watch with their family?
• Are parents using the parental guidance feature?
• Where are people using BBC iPlayer - at home, at work, at school, on the train?
• How did they find BBC iPlayer in the first place?
• Why did they (or didn't they) go back again?

Image by Jon Jacobs on Flickr

So we asked a representative group of people (^* detail at the end if you're interested) to answer a list of questions that we drew up together across the BBC iPlayer team. From their answers, we can make a picture of what the typical BBC iPlayer user is like. Here's a snapshot:

• The typical BBC iPlayer user is a man aged about 40, in a full-time job, with a partner but no kids. He uses BBC iPlayer at home over a fast broadband connection, and accesses it on a desktop PC in the evenings - usually on his own, though sometimes his girlfriend watches something with him.
• He found it through the BBC homepage, and was prompted to try it for the first time when he missed something specific on TV. He still tends to go there looking for a particular programme, rather than just to browse what's available. He gets there through the bbc.co.uk homepage.
• When he's found the right programme, he streams it in full-screen mode (he hasn't connected his PC to a TV set), although sometimes he watches within the webpage when he wants to do something else on his PC at the same time. He has downloaded BBC iPlayer programmes before, but is usually too impatient to wait. He's never had any problems with his ISP because of BBC iPlayer, though. He's never used the BBC iPlayer on a portable device, or on Wii.
• Sometimes, he won't bother watching something on linear TV since he knows he can watch it on BBC iPlayer later. He thinks the rules about what's on BBC iPlayer are fairly clear, but still finds that the programme he wants isn't there sometimes. He'd love the seven-day limit to be longer.
• People really like the BBC iPlayer - they find it easy to use, like the way it looks, and have recommended it to their friends. When asked, people usually couldn't think of anything that could improve it; they like it just the way it is.

I know that many of the BBC iPlayer users reading this blog won't fit into this profile - some are likely to be ahead of the curve, and more likely to have tried BBC iPlayer on their iPhone or Wii, or to have connected their PC or Mac to a TV screen.

While the research said that the "typical BBC iPlayer user was a male aged 40", only 25% of BBC iPlayer users are actually aged 35-44. We were really happy to find that older people, as well as younger ones, are using BBC iPlayer, so we're not just attracting the stereotypical younger early adopters who will generally pick up on new technologies and gadgets before the mainstream. The BBC iPlayer age profile is actually right in line with the profile of the general broadband UK population. But 35-44 is the most commonly selected age range from this survey, with smaller proportions of users in the other age bands.

Outside of the most common behaviour, here are some other facts that I thought were interesting:

• Levels of repeat use of BBC iPlayer are good - only 13% had only used it once, and 17% had watched more than 20 programmes
• 32% always access it on a laptop; 51% always on a desktop computer
• 5% of people were using BBC iPlayer on a Mac, and 1% on a Linux system
• 18% said they had "ever" connected their computer to a TV screen; 5% "always" do this to watch programmes on BBC iPlayer
• A lot of people stream and download on different occasions - only 18% never stream, 42% never download
• Only 1% had never used BBC iPlayer at home, but 84% had never used it at work
• Most people were using BBC iPlayer on a computer they share with other members of their household
• However 60% only ever use BBC iPlayer on their own - 34% have used with other adults, and 13% have watched with children
• 49% of BBC iPlayer (TV) users have also listened to radio on the BBC website

These results are helping to guide decisions going forward for the BBC iPlayer service, both developing it as a product, and planning how best we can encourage new people to try it out. We plan to repeat this kind of research in future every so often.

Obviously, this research is only part of the picture, and we continue to read all the other feedback we get directly from users too. For example, I start and end each day checking recent blog posts and Twitter comments about BBC iPlayer - it's great way to get instant feedback on what people like or early warning of any technical or usability problems. It's all invaluable in helping us make BBC iPlayer your favourite video and audio destination.

^* The sample in this survey was 2027 UK adults, selected from an online market research survey panel to be representative of the UK adult online population in terms of age, gender and UK nation. 901 of them had used BBC iPlayer, and 794 of these people went on to answer more detailed questions about the service. The survey was conducted independently for the BBC by Dipsticks Research Limited in May of this year.

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media, BBC Future Media & Technology.

First, in January, we "pimped up" the iPlayer site by adding Most Popular, Just In, Last Chance and More Like This zones.

In February, we made iPlayer available on Apple iPhone. Then, in March, we made iPlayer available on Nintendo Wii.

So... what's next? It's time to let the cat out of the bag and tell you about the next big thing that we're working on: an all-new iPlayer website.

The existing iPlayer website works really well, and has proven hugely successful. However, in Internet Land nothing stays still for long and the iPlayer site that you see now is based on a somewhat inflexible static-page-rendering platform that's now over a year old.

That technology platform has proven robust and reliable, but we've pushed it to the limit in terms of features that we can add using the existing site architecture. It's now time to move onto an all-new dynamic-page-rendering architecture which will give us with a platform that can provide a personalised TV and radio experience, can adapt itself to different display sizes - and a whole lot more.

But enough preamble: here's a sneak preview of BBC iPlayer 2.0. which will be launching as a beta very soon..

First up, we think it's gorgeous - thanks to the brilliant work of our in-house User Experience & Design (UXD) team - with a visual theme that matches the new bbc.co.uk site "house style":

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The most important change is that we combined TV and Radio in the same iPlayer interface, which means that you when you go to, say, Comedy, you'll find your favourite TV and radio comedy programmes all in the same page, like this:

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I'll say immediately that combining TV and radio in the same interface was a much-debated design decision.

One of the attractions of the current iPlayer site is that it's brilliantly simple, and we don't want to lose that simplicity. However, we felt that if we could provide a way to let you find your favourite TV and radio programmes in one place, that would be a major win.

But, for those who want to see TV only, or Radio only, you can easily do that by clicking the "TV", "Radio" or "TV and Radio" links.

Of course, you can also go directly to your favourite TV channel or national radio network:

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Next, the first of many personalisation additions that we'll be adding over the coming months: the iPlayer site will now remember which programmes you last played and where you got up to in each programme.

If you don't have time to finish a programme, no problem: when you next go back to the iPlayer site, it will be right there on the homepage, ready to resume from where you last left off with just a single click:

Not only will iPlayer remember which shows you've recently played, but when new episodes of those programmes become available they'll automatically show up in the Last Played widget for you. So, if you're a Torchwood fan, when you come back next week, your new Torchwood episode should be ready for you to play directly from the homepage.

As people begin using iPlayer more, it's clear that they're deciding to not watch programmes on TV, expecting to be able to watch them on iPlayer later. But how do you know if a programme will be available in iPlayer?

One of our most common feature requests is for an indication of whether a given programme is scheduled to appear in iPlayer or not, so we have provided a full schedule view that shows all programmes that were on TV and radio, with an indication of which are available for viewing in iPlayer now, which are coming soon, and which (usually for content licensing reasons) are not scheduled for iPlayer.

And, for those who want to use iPlayer to catch up on last night's TV - a common use case - we made that easier with a dedicated widget on the homepage:

One thing conspicuously missing from the current iPlayer site is the provision of RSS feeds. For those who want to consume our content via their RSS reader, or who want to create mashups of the iPlayer site - good news - every page has an RSS feed.

You can even subscribe to a feed of an arbitrary search query, allowing you to use third party feed readers to alert you when your favourite programmes arrive:

Finally (we kept the best bit for last), we're making huge improvements to the quality of both TV and radio within iPlayer.

For TV, we have an all-new playback experience with a larger playback window (640 pixels wide, up from the previous 512 pixels - that's a 25% size increase), and a new More Like This widget at the bottom of the page (now also available in full-screen mode!) which will form a key element in our personalisation roadmap over the coming months:

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For radio, we're starting to making huge improvements to the radio quality. Elsewhere in this blog you'll have seen some discussion of the changes to streaming radio online; watch out for a post from Mark Friend (from BBC Audio & Music) soon with the full details, but as a listener to BBC Radio 3, let's just say I'm particularly pleased with the changes... ;)

And if you're an existing iPlayer For Radio user, you'll spot an all-new popup radio console - a sleek new design with a built-in More Like This widget which will, in due course, grow to provide you with your own personalised radio station.

As you can guess, we've got a huge amount of work to do to pull this all together. iPlayer gets five million page views per day now, which we think will double when we add radio, and then double again over the next few months, so our plan is to "dual run" the new site alongside the old for a few weeks while we make sure the server can handle the load, listen to and act on your feedback, iron out bugs, etc.

Many of the iPlayer 2.0 enhancements are based on user testing and your feedback. We love to get ideas and comments, so let me know which things you'd like to see that haven't made it into our iPlayer 2.0 release and - who knows - they may show up in a future site update.

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media Technology, BBC Future Media and Technology.

As you know, our aim is to make BBC iPlayer available on a broad range of devices. We'd love to be on every popular device tomorrow, including the PS3, and it was on our roadmap. However, the reality is that we only have finite developer resources, and we need to divide our development time between expanding the platforms iPlayer is available on versus all the other cool things that we're working on (better video quality, personalisation, new site features, etc).

For each new device that we plan to support, we look at both a short and long term strategy, starting with encoding our content in a suitable format for browser-enabled devices that can view the iPlayer site, and moving in the longer term to possible customised versions of the site or even full custom applications for that device.

So, while I'm impressed that someone has done this, this doesn't mean that it's the best possible iPlayer proposition for that console. We're investigating the optimal video profile and browser proposition to enable us to officially make iPlayer available on PS3 in due course.

By the way, if the person who created the ps3iplayer port is looking for a job at the BBC, (s)he's welcome to contact me ;-)

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media Technology, Future Media & Technology. Image by Martin Belam.

The theme for this month's iPlayer release is "iPlayer in the living room" - i.e., watching BBC on-demand programmes on your big-screen television set.

Today, most people watch iPlayer programmes on their computer. That's great - you can watch your favourite BBC programmes curled up in bed with your notebook PC, or on your study desk while you check your email, or (if you downloaded our programmes) on the plane or away abroad on holiday.

But have you tried hooking up your computer to your TV set?

iPlayer programmes, particularly downloaded programmes, look great on a TV. The video quality is usually even better when iPlayer programmes are played back on a TV than on your computer screen. Most newish computers, particularly notebook computers, have an S-video output, which, with a suitable S-video to SCART cable, can connect to most modern TV sets. If you have an LCD or plasma TV, chances are that it will have a Video Graphics Array input which will give even better picture quality when connected to the VGA output of your notebook PC. (N.B. Picture of S-Video output courtsey of yum9me on Flickr.)

If you have a Nintendo Wii, it's already connected to your TV, and now you can play iPlayer programmes directly on your Wii.

Connect your PC, Mac or Wii to your TV now and get a glimpse of the future, which is of course an IP-connected browser-based device that plays video-on-demand programming on your TV set.

For those who are after the tech details, here's the lowdown on our Wii port:

Nintendo Wii supports only Flash 7, which uses the Sorenson Spark codec rather than the ON2 VP6 codec introduced with Flash 8. Unfortunately, the Sorenson compression isn't nearly as good as ON2 VP6 compression, which is why most video sites gave up encoding their content in Flash 7 compatible format.

However, there are a lot of Wii boxes out there hooked up to TV sets, so with a little extra encoding effort (specifically, transcoding an additional 400 hours per week in an extra format) we can make BBC iPlayer programming available on Flash 7-enabled devices, including Wii.

Our regular Flash content is encoded at 500Kbps. We chose that bitrate because it's the highest quality that could be reliably streamed on pretty much any UK broadband internet connection. However, for Wii we had to increase the bitrate to 820Kbps because the Sorenson codec used by Wii simply needs more bits to achieve the same picture quality. So, for a smooth playback experience on Wii you'll need an internet connection that can give you 1Mbps or better. If you're experiencing buffering issues, try turning off those p2p downloads that are running on other computers around your home.

The Flash player that ships with Wii was designed to support YouTube-style quality levels rather than the much higher video quality that we try to provide in iPlayer. Unfortunately, that means on Wii, at least at this time, our programmes won't look as crisp as on Mac, PC or iPhone. iPlayer on Wii is still in beta, and over the coming weeks we'll tweak the video encoding rates and playback window size to get the best possible video quality.

There are over 2.5 million Wiis in the UK, which according to Nintendo should reach five million by Christmas, so getting onto Wii means potentially a huge new audience for BBC iPlayer. However, we're taking a phased approach to this, where we've started with a relatively low development effort of keeping our regular iPlayer site (which is a bit large for the Wii's 800 pixel-wide screen size, requiring some scrolling when browsing for programmes) and encoding content in Flash 7 format.

As iPlayer usage on Wii takes off, we'll consider creating an optimised version of the iPlayer for Wii. Hopefully, this won't require people to shell out for the Internet Channel, and which will provide an optimized browsing and playback experience, perhaps even as a dedicated BBC iPlayer channel on Wii.

Stay tuned for more on this.

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media Technologies, BBC Future Media and Technology.

To play BBC programmes on your iPhone or iPod touch, you'll need to be online via a wi-fi broadband connection (the iPhone's EDGE connectivity is too slow for streaming video). BBCiPlayer on iPhone is a beta version right now, so if you find some programmes aren't available on iPhone or you get the occasional oddity... yep, we're working on it.

Ever since we announced that we were working on BBC iPlayer for iPhone, there's been a lot of speculation in the blogosphere as to how it would work. Would we use Apple's new iPhone SDK? Would we use the rumoured Flash for iPhone? What video format and bitrate would we choose? And which devices will we support next...?

So, for those interested in a behind-the-scenes look, here's the low-down...

For devices with browsers, assuming that those browsers are able to access and display the BBC iPlayer website, getting BBC iPlayer working on those devices "merely" [see below] requires us to provide audio and/or video streams in a format that is supported by the media player(s) available on that device.

For devices without browsers, it becomes necessary to create custom applications that users need to install and run on that device. There's little standardisation across devices, and creating these custom apps is time-consuming and expensive; so for now, we're focusing on browser-enabled devices.

We started with iPhone because it is the device most optimised for high quality video currently available. It displays the BBC iPlayer site and BBC programmes nicely. But - go on, speculate! - we're working on making BBCiPlayer available on many more browser-enabled devices over the coming months: stay tuned for details...

Back to BBC iPlayer on iPhone implementation: we're not using the new Apple SDK, nor are we using the much-rumoured Flash for iPhone (no - we haven't seen it, either). Instead, we're creating 516Kbps streams (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) that show off BBC programmes brilliantly on an iPhone.

There's been a lot of press about the amount of money that the BBC spent developing iPlayer, but what most people don't realise is that only a small fraction of the cost went into the parts that you see (i.e., the web site), with most of the cost going into the development of a high-quality content production backend that's able to crank out 400 hours of content each week to the BBC's high standards (frame-accurate in and out points; manual quality control; provision of subtitled and signed versions; guidance-labelling for stuff not suitable for children; rich metadata, etc).

That probably doesn't sound too hard, but consider this: every day, tapes for the programmes that you see on TV (the pre-recorded ones, not live events) are retrieved from our secure archive facility, delivered to our playout centre at Red Bee Media, and sequenced for playout to TV. As you've probably noticed, BBC One hardly ever goes down, so this system has been optimised over many years and is tightly run. Into that process we needed to add the transcoding of that content for our various iPlayer platforms, including PC iPlayer (e.g. the one available at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer), TV iPlayer (available soon on Virgin Media), and now portable devices.

This means that every programme needs to be transcoded in a Flash version (for PC streaming), a WMV version (Windows PC download), MPEG2 (TV set-top box), H.264 (web browser), and a variety of other formats coming soon. To do this, we have a transcoding farm of over 50 rack-mount PCs, most of which are running really fast dual quad-core Xeon CPUs. As content arrives off tape (for pre-recorded programmes) or off-air (from our digital satellite links, for live content like news and sport), it's fed into the transcoding platform.

Those input files are encoded at over 50Mbps which makes them huge - around 25GB per hour of incoming video. With eight BBC TV channels plus 18 regional news broadcasts, that means we need to deal with up to 24 simultaneous incoming programmes, for a peak data rate of over a gigabit per second of incoming video.

We now need to transcode those source files into each supported output format. The various file formats take different amounts of time to transcode - it takes roughly twice as much CPU time to create a 1Mbps WMV files as it takes to create a 500Kbps Flash file, which is why you'll sometimes see programmes in iPlayer that are available for streaming but not (yet) for download; the downloadable version usually arrives an hour or so later.

The transcoded files are then "pushed" to streaming and p2p download head-end servers, and rights management (i.e. content encryption) applied as needed. Separately, programme metadata is delivered into our database. As soon as both metadata and the first of the available media files for a given programme have been received and are confirmed (all automatically, of course) by our system, then that programme becomes available in BBC iPlayer.

We've recently added a just in section ("Most Recent") to the bbc.co.uk BBC iPlayer homepage so you can see this in action - every few minutes, this section is updated, showing the latest content that's arrived into our system and made available in iPlayer.

Looking at the BBCiPlayer website, it all looks pretty simple - but beneath the hood, there's a lot of moving parts to deal with those real-time high-bitrate long-format incoming programmes, to process them, to QC them, and to make them available in BBC iPlayer, 24/7.

The challenge is to continuously enhance that transcoding platform to support a whole host of new formats to make BBC iPlayer available in the coming months at higher and higher display resolution and quality, and on more and more devices. Which mobile, portable or gaming device would you like to see it on next?

There's lots of exciting things to work on!

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media Technologies