I saw a news story today about how the N96 Nokia phone was getting an iPlayer application. For anyone outside the UK iPlayer is a P2P web site providing access to re-runs of recent TV broadcasts, plus live and recorded radio shows. It has been held wholly responsible for stretching the broadband providers’ capacity here over the last year, and very good it is too.
Anyway I was about to get all cross and question why Nokia was getting such assistance from UK’s state broadcaster, when I realised something, the BBC has a whole iPlayer site for mobiles and it works just fine with my iPhone. Download an hour-long TV episode in a couple of minutes to watch in my hand at my leisure? I’ve never done that before today.
Put Simply 
You can watch iPlayer on an iPod Touch too, as I discovered in the New Forest one Sunday waiting for Rog who’d gone off to find a bike he bought on eBay.
I’m not sure you can download the shows though, as far as I’m aware you can watch them streaming, but only Windows PCs are able to download them. I haven’t checked for a while though so I think I may just have a look.
Did it work Sa? At least the iPhones have a big enough screen to make it worth trying to watch TV on a phone!
It works in that you can watch the programs streaming, and they’re very good quality, but you can’t download them to an iPhone if you want to watch offline. Mind you, you can’t do that on a Mac yet either.
Yeah well what makes me sick about this is that if you hack the User Agent string on a Nokia N95 then it can already access the iPhone iPlayer… why are the BBC locking us out of a great service, and, as you say, favouring certain manufacturers over others? I’m sure there are phones other than the N95 that could also play the iPhone iPlayer streams too.
Jesus what happened to open standards… I pay my TV licence etc etc rant rant… ah well roll on October 1st, I’m hoping that this software won’t be locked to the N96 only.