Internet TV just got a whole closer

The BBC iPlayer is Aunties online TV service. I’m sure you all heard about the strong criticisms when the iPlayer was launched. Put simply, it only worked on WindowsXP and Vista, which upset a few people. As far as I know, at the time, it was impossible to use the service on Mac, and any Linux distribution. So I pretty much ignored it.

The Beeb have promised that they’ll make the service available “cross-platform”, in fact, both the BBC Trust, and the government have said they have to.

Yesterday was quite day, so I thought i would go and check out the iPlayer home page, expecting to still see a “Windows only download link” and then some really limited slow online content. Instead what I found was a surprisingly well stocked catalogue of previous TV programs all ready for watching on the webpage, ranging from News to Comedy to Drama to Music. But the best was yet to come. Even on my really-slow-countryside-BT-please-make-my-internet-faster connection at home, the video playback was almost instant. Even skipping to the middle of a video, the pause is only about 2 seconds, before the video starts to play again! No longer do you have to wait for the buffer to catch up (i’m looking at you, YouTube and Google). The quality is also pretty impressive. Its not TV resolution yet, but it’s defiantly watchable. My only gripe is, because its running through a flashplayer, embeded in a webpage, I cannot control playback with my apple remote controller, but that’s it. Internet TV just got a whole lot closer.