chris nixon : nixonbyname.com

One of my most popular posts on NixonByName is this one in which I’m pretty disparaging about BBC’s iPlayer. The system was clunky, it slowed down my PC a great deal, and the overall experience was poor.

It didn’t take long for me to give up on it all together.

The iPlayer is now fully available to UK users, and with a huge promotion push from the TV channels, is gaining popularity.

I now use a Mac, so I am forced to use the flash version of the player…and I’m really enjoying it. I wouldn’t use it to watch all my BBC shows, but as a catch-up tool it’s excellent. If they could get the UI for browsing available shows to be a little better, I would say it’s perfect for when you’ve missed that vital show.

It’s pretty simple. You search for a show, click it, and it starts playing. That’s the way watching TV online is supposed to be. Even if the downloadable version of iPlayer was available for the Mac, I’m not sure I’d bother…my Media Center does the job of normal TV viewing, this is just for when something is forgotten.

My favorite feature is when you have missed the end of a show, something that can happen with MCE. iPlayer doesn’t require you to load the whole show to watch the end part. You can just skip forward near to the end, and it will just load from there. Brilliant.

With all the hype surrounding the launch of the BBC’s iPlayer, I thought I should sign up and give it a go. I’m going to go through the installation step-by-step, and let you know how I get on. At the moment it’s XP only, but the BBC say there should be a Mac and Vista version by Autumn.

After signing up at the BBC iPlayer site, I got an email a few hours later accepting me to the closed beta. This kind of surprised me. I thought that the beta was open. There has been a closed beta of the iPlayer for a couple of years now that was impossible to get on, and in all the promotion on the BBC over the last few days, there was nothing I saw that said it was still closed. Very strange, but not to worry. I’m in there now.

The email received contains a step-by-step guide to installing the software. I click through and put in my authentication details in a pop-up password box (eew), and I’m in to the iPlayer system. There are a few good shows on the front page, one of which is the Top Gear Polar Special, which I missed during the week. I click through, hit the bright pink download button…and hit the skids as it informs me that I need to use Internet Explorer for this system. Brilliant job BBC, way to get the geeks on board. This’ll probably be part of that deal the BBC did with Microsoft a few months back.

I reluctantly open up IE, and go through the same process again. At the same stage I was stopped before, it now tells me I have to install the iPlayer software. Now we’re getting somewhere. I click the link to download, and a pop-up asks for my authentication details again. I had saved this the previous time around, but apparently I’ve got to cut and paste them across again. Once this is done a file downloads very quickly to my desktop, and I double click.

The installation process is very quick, and at the end it asks me if I want to set up a pin for parental safety. I decline, and the software opens up saying my library is currently empty. I click back to IE, hit the download button again, and the IE pop-up warns me that something is trying to open. I click to allow this, and hit the download button again…and hit the skids again as it asks me to log-in.

This is getting stupid. Apparently I have to create a log-in for my account. The log-in details they sent me in the email don’t work because they are for getting on to the site, not using it. I’ve used many betas in my life, but never one as complicated to use as this. I think most people would have given up by this point, but I’ve come this far, and I’m going to get to the end of this marathon if it kills me.

I register for the service, which is pretty easy, doesn’t require any email authentication, and logs me in automatically at the end of the process.

So…I click the download button again. A little flash box says it’s checking my progress, and the the Top Gear show pops up in my iPlayer software. At last! It’s a 60 minute show at 387Mb, and at this time in the morning, the download speed seems pretty fast. I am at 5% after a couple of minutes. While it’s downloading I have a click around the site to see if I can find anything else cool to download.

I navigate to the news and weather section to get the latest news and weather forecast (they should download pretty quickly) but unfortunately, this section doesn’t have any news or weather in it. Once again, very strange. I can get World Business Report, but that sounds as dull as dishwater. I could also get Your News, a show based on user generated content which is not really what I want either. There are a few other shows available in other sections, but I already have all the ones I want saves on my Media Center. There’s no point in slowing down the show I want to watch.

After a cup of tea, I’m back at the PC with Top Gear fully downloaded. It took about 45 minutes, which is faster than a normal torrent download for me. I click play and a nice little player opens with a BBC2 ident playing. The show starts immediately after, and I click the full screen to watch the show in all it’s Top Gear top camerawork 16:9 glory. I’m a little disappointed by the picture quality. I have got a pretty high resolution wide-screen monitor, so that could be why the picture looks fuzzy. It may not be the same on the LCD TV in the living room.

I can’t see this replacing less legal methods of getting TV shows from the BBC any time soon, they are just more convenient. Once you hit play, you have 7 days to watch the show before it expires, otherwise you have 30 days. That’s just a bit silly, being that my license fee pays for these shows already. They didn’t put the same restrictions on video recorders, so why start now? There are rumors that the DRM can be stripped from shows, but that’s an inconvenience that would just make some just look for the torrent.

We are only one day into the launch and I know that there are many improvements planned. I understand that they released the XP version quickly, and that has pissed off the OSX and Vista users, but not allowing Firefox is absolutely ridiculous. That’s surely a matter of a tiny bit of code. The system seems a little bit unfinished. I’d prefer to search for shows within the software, rather than from a web site. If they did that it would also save me from opening the dreaded Internet Explorer.

I’ll keep coming back to this software. I’m excited about what it could become, but at the moment I’m disappointed.

[update: Ryan Stewart at ZDNet had a very similar experience]