BBC iPlayer for iPad Going International: Western Europe Today, U.S. and Others Later This Year

[MRU]

Here in Oz good tv is very hard to find! We've tried the proxy route put the bottle neck makes it impossible to view. This will be well worth the money. Question: do you think the ipad would be able to push this to an apple tv via airplay?

No.


Only iPad 2 via HDMI is supported sadly.

 

[weckart]

So is offline viewing and storage coming to the UK version? I don't get why international customers get more whilst us, the license payers, get shafted.

I suppose it'll arrive soon, though.

Offline viewing and storage (up to 30 days and DRMed) has been available with the domestic player since day one.

On the other hand, offline viewing and storage (in perpetuity unDRMed) was only available with iPlayer Downloader RIP, although Get iPlayer Automator is supposed to work still.

 

[adrian.oconnor]

I got rid of my TV, because there was such a lot of junk on. Much of the BBC's programming is lowest-common-denominator trash - Brucie on dancing programmes, dumbed down lifestyle stuff, 'comforting' presenters (alan Titchmarsh etc), sentimental soaps. I'd prefer them to be broken up and the public's money distributed to a wider range of smaller broadcasters.

I'd happily pay €49.99 for a 'best of' selection on the iPad, but I definitely won't (and don't) pay £145.50.

I got rid of my TV, because I also agree that there's a lot of junk. However, I still pay the TV license, because BBC is just leagues ahead of Sky and ITV, and if they were to stop we'd be a lot poorer for it. We still watch occasional stuff on iPlayer, and sometimes live (like F1 coverage, Cbeebies), so that's why we kept the license.

Without the BBC there'd be a total lack of popular science and nature programs. C4 do a lot of interesting stuff too, but it's more urban/film based. I think maybe you don't appreciate the BBC right now because you're outside of the demographic that they really serve, but as you get older -- middle age and beyond, you'll probably start to see it in a different light.

One final point -- as others have already mentioned -- this venture is part of the BBC's commercial arm. It has nothing to do with the license fee. The BBC work just like any other distributor when it goes over seas.

 

[pjac]

Offline viewing and storage (up to 30 days and DRMed) has been available with the domestic player since day one.

Not on the UK BBC iPlayer app, see:
http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/tablets/ipadapp_prog_download

 

[firestarter]

I got rid of my TV, because I also agree that there's a lot of junk. However, I still pay the TV license, because BBC is just leagues ahead of Sky and ITV, and if they were to stop we'd be a lot poorer for it. We still watch occasional stuff on iPlayer, and sometimes live (like F1 coverage, Cbeebies), so that's why we kept the license.

Sky and ITV are 100% commercial and have no extra funding for public service broadcasting.

Without the BBC there'd be a total lack of popular science and nature programs. C4 do a lot of interesting stuff too, but it's more urban/film based. I think maybe you don't appreciate the BBC right now because you're outside of the demographic that they really serve, but as you get older -- middle age and beyond, you'll probably start to see it in a different light.

You're very kind... but I'm probably older than you think. I don't think you're right in saying "without the BBC there'd be a total lack of popular science and nature programs" - no, I'm not against money being collected for public service broadcasting, I'm just against it all being given to one organisation - without any competition. Where there's public money, there would be resources for science programming made by other organisations. The programmes you like are the result of available finance and home-grown creative talent. Splitting the BBC up wouldn't change either of those factors.

I also think the esteem the BBC's science output is held in is often over stated. Brian Cox's programmes are pretty, but fairly superficial. The way the BBC films him switching to a different exotic location every 20 seconds underscores their profligacy.

One final point -- as others have already mentioned -- this venture is part of the BBC's commercial arm. It has nothing to do with the license fee. The BBC work just like any other distributor when it goes over seas.

I'm aware of that. I'd prefer to buy programming on a 'pay per view' basis though, which is why I made the comparison. I don't want to hand over £145 a year, because there's no way that I can indicate which 5% of output I actually want to watch, and the 95% I don't want money spent on. Even if it cost the same or more, I'd like to have that influence.

With the cost of production equipment going down, along with the cost of delivery (internet), I think the BBC is starting to stifle the small startups that should be delivering content in the UK. If the licence fee was made available for small local studios, small specialist-interest production companies etc. I'm convinced we'd end up with a much wider range of high quality programming.

 

[rowley]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I think 40p a day (12 quid a month) for all the BBC content, both broadcast and online is a far price. Besides not all the tv license is handed over to the BBC from the government anyway. This iPad venture is BBC worldwide anyway, a company not funded by the tv license fee, they sell the shows to other countries.

 

[robj]

Talking about the iPlayer (Europe Version), has anybody tried to plug the iPad2 to a TV set using the HDMI option?

Is the content displayed in fullscreen?

I've watched some videos in youtube about the ipad2 mirroring and the content (apps, home screen) is not in fullscreen mode, however that doesn't happen if a video is displayed.

The iPlayer content is, of course, video, but it's not displayed using the standard video player of the ipad but its own video player.

 

[robj]

Talking about the iPlayer (Europe Version), has anybody tried to plug the iPad2 to a TV set using the HDMI option?

Is the content displayed in fullscreen?

I've watched some videos in youtube about the ipad2 mirroring and the content (apps, home screen) is not in fullscreen mode, however that doesn't happen if a video is displayed.

The iPlayer content is, of course, video, but it's not displayed using the standard video player of the ipad but its own video player.

Quoting myself, NO, the content isn't displayed in full screen using the HDMI cable

As I supposed, given that the player used by iPlayer app is not the "system" one, the content is displayed in a small frame of your big TV set

In my opinion, this is a major drawback and hope BBC guys will fix it soon.