BBC'S iPlayer Available On The iPhone

BBC's iPlayer which allows people to download BBC programs or watch them over the internet, is now available on Apple's iPhone (or iPod Touch). Being in beta, it's only available in Britain right now, but an interesting development that could one day be available worldwide. Because the iPhone does not support Flash video playback, the BBC has to reformat it's content into Apple's QuickTime version of the H.264 standard video format. Those videos are then streamed to the iPhone via a modded version of the iPlayer website.

The iPhone's inability to play Flash has meant the BBC really had to take extreme measures to bring their programming to the iPhone. They had to built a "transcoding farm" of 50 computers just to reformat the 400 hours of television programming per week they want to make available on the iPhone. It's also of interest to note that the iPlayer only works when the iPhone is connected through Wi-Fi as the video players doesn't work with EDGE, most likely because the bandwidth required to stream the content is too high for current cellular networks.

Via Bits

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