BBC Internet Blog

Take part in BBC iPlayer Day this Friday

Dave Lee
8 Dec 08, 4:35 PM

This week marks the first anniversary of the BBC iPlayer's soft launch. Since last December, a whopping 180 million programmes have been watched.

So the BBC Internet Blog is hosting a very special event.

This Friday, we'll be going behind the scenes to lift the lid on how Britain's most popular TV catch-up service works.

From 9am, we'll be posting at least every hour. You can look forward to video, guest posts, pictures, diagrams and anything we can lay our hands on as the day unfolds. We'll be talking to (and capturing) the BBC people who play a part in the complex iPlayer process.

And, in the spirit of all things social media, we'd like to invite everyone to take part.

Are you watching iPlayer at home, at work or anywhere else? Take a picture, and add it to our special iPlayer Day Flickr group - we'll publish the best and most interesting on our site.

Twitter legions, let us know what you think of the iPlayer, its programmes and features, by tagging your posts #iplayerday. We'll be streaming them live on the blog. Twittering BBC staff will be taking part all day too.

We hope iPlayer Day will give everyone who uses the service a chance to feed back and discuss anything about it they wish. If you have any ideas you want to get off your chest, Friday really is the day to do it.

Twitter:

Follow us at @bbccouk. We'll be twittering live all day. Tag your posts with #iplayerday, and we'll find your comments.

Flickr:

Our iPlayer Day Flickr group can be found here: www.flickr.com/groups/iplayerday. You can upload your pictures directly to it and we'll stream them on the site!

Anything else:

There'll be lots of posts so you can leave comments on the blog - and if you've got ideas in advance leave a comment below.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

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Interesting stuff 2008-12-08

Dave Lee
8 Dec 08, 2:20 PM

Last week, Project Kangaroo suffered a set-back when the Competition Commission ruled that it would restrict video-on-demand competition in the UK.

Kangaroo should not have been jumped on so soon, says the Guardian's Emily Bell today:

If Kangaroo produced a world-beating platform that grew like billyo then, of course, it should not be allowed to act unfairly, but the internet is not bandwidth restricted and the TV market and the web market are still different beasts."

The Kangaroo ruling is being discussed on the Backstage mailing list, too.

Elsewhere in the Guardian, Jemima Kiss meets Tom Scott, right. Tom explains his latest work at the BBC:

At its best, the BBC provides a great public service. At the moment that is pretty much limited to its content and storytelling, but in the past that also meant technology. It needs to work out what that means for the web; when it does, and if it is done well, that could be great for the web at large - both the people that use it and companies making a living from it. My worry is that that doesn't happen and we're all poorer as a result."

Viewers who own a Playstation 3 may now be pleased to learn that BBC iPlayer is now available through the console. This is thanks to a firmware upgrade from Sony.

Blogger TechnicalMarkus is less than happy with popular BBC series 'Survivors'. His main point of annoyance being the cast's mobile phones...

I'm willing to bet the BBC (thanks to the unique way it's funded) splurged on a job lot of cheap pay as you go mobile phones, and bought about three top-end phones, two of which Spooks nicked, before the Survivors crew could finish writing their script out on the back of a fag packet...