The BBC unveiled their Mac and Linux friendly version of the iPlayer the other day. It’s streaming only, and apart from the limitation of having to be connected to broadband to view, I’m impressed (though recent BBC tech has lowered expectations somewhat). The quality is ok and it starts quickly. It’s only a beta, and that shows in the reliability. I’ve watched 3 or 4 shows so far and they’ve all stopped in the middle with an unhelpful error message. Reloading the page clears the problem but puts you back to the start of the programme. It’s easy enough to skip through to the right point… if you remember the timestamp from just before it failed. For that situation, I really wish the BBC would track the viewing point and cache it so it could state on the page where in the programme you were when you last left the page.
As I said, I’m impressed, and I look forward to seeing it improve.
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