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BBC iPlayer Reaches Virgin with 50% Content

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Daily Links |

I know that it’s a good thing that the BBC iPlayer is now offically part of the Virgin Media TV package, but I can’t help thinking (a) why this wasn’t done years ago by a decent BBC Management Team, and (b) I still don’t trust it. Not in the Orwellian sense of trust, more in the fall backwards and let your bitter and twisted office colleagues catch you sense of trust.

With four main TV channels (lets not complicate things with adding in the regional channels… 4 channel x 24 hours x 7 days churns out 672 hours of TV. The iPlayer at the moment carries 350 hours a week. So about half the content of the BBC is not on iPlayer, and it can’t all be BBC3’s endless repeats of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. It wouldn’t be the first time that Virgin Media have had a whole series on Catch up TV bar one episode, and that one is invariably the one I miss.

At the moment, I can’t trust the iPlayer will carry the shows that I want to watch. Virgin already carry a number of ‘Catch Up TV’ shows, so the iPlayer slots nicely into here. In fact I suspect that the iPlayer branding is being applied to a legal chit that allows Virgin to add more BBC content to their system, and will give Virgin another string in a very tired bow to fight Sky TV. Whether the BBC wants dragged into this fight or not, it’s now there.

It will be interesting to see what this does to the net neutrality debate in the UK - and I also wonder just how big the pipe into my cable box is, compared to my modem? Do I need to be running speed tests on before and after’ while the Virgin iPlayer streams ‘Doctor Who?’ Some testing I think is required.

On the subject of interactivity, programming and the BBC, they actually have a very good example currently running - that’s being blogged about here shortly.