Into The Unknown

... Apparently. From around the time of the latest (and last) iPlayer closed beta launch, which I reviewed and commented on, the client has been updated, the site's a bit slicker, and the content is encoded better. There's been a lot of talk, heated discussion (on the BBC Backstage mailing list, primarily!) and all kinds of indignant comments from people snorting about how the iPlayer launch was almost a dummy run, given that you could only really properly install and use it on one OS...

Yeah, I'm steering well clear of that, the BBC are having to work within the constraints of the rights holders here, and I get this continued feeling that they're breaking them in gently (today: 'how about digitising your content?'... 18 months later: 'we'd like to renegotiate the availability period for digitised content, up from 31 days after broadcast and 7 days after first viewing'... 36 months later: 'after becoming a requirement of our latest Public Value Test, we're removing DRM from our available programming content')... You get the picture.

Anyway, I don't have a copy of Vista installed (deliberately) to check, but others are reporting success installing and running the app without having to resort to glorious hacks to get it to work.

So, if you're game for a bit of timeslipped BBC content, go install it! http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer. (After I installed it almost four months ago, I never looked back. :)