BBC iPlayer was finally launched

In December, the BBC iPlayer was finally launched giving people in the United Kingdom the chance to stream via the internet or download BBC programmes up to seven days after they have aired on free-to-air TV. In its first seven weeks of availability, iPlayer has served up 17 million programmes, according to the BBC.

Rather disappointingly, the service isn't available in New Zealand - your IP address is used to ascertain where you are logging on from. But the BBC suggests on its website that an international version of the iPlayer is in the works:

"Rights agreements mean that BBC iPlayer television programmes are only available to users to download or stream (Click to Play) in the UK. However, BBC Worldwide is working on an international version, which we will make available as soon as possible."

What you are presented with when you log on to iPlayer are two ways of watching BBC programmes on-demand - at a time of your choosing rather than when the shows screen on TV.

In London for a few days, I've had the chance to test out both the streaming and download models and have found the service overall to be very user-friendly and pretty good in terms of quality. I just watched the BBC crime drama Ashes to Ashes as a video stream connecting to iPlayer over a Wi-fi connection.

The feed was stutter-free and the image blown up to fill my laptop screen was perfectly watchable. I was able to skip forward through the show from the outset.

Streaming the BBC content means you don't have to ait for it to download - the quality isn't as good streaming, you occasionally see audio out of sync with the picture and some pixilation, but it's instant digital viewing without the need to own a digital video recorder.

Interestingly, TVNZ is embracing this viewing model for is TVNZ OnDemand portal, which shows its confidence in streaming over broadband and even dial-up connections in New Zealand.

Brits on broadband connections may prefer the download option for playback of shows. Here you use the iPlayer Download Manager, a 5MB application you download and install to manage the interaction with the peer-to-peer network that's used to grab the content from other downloaders, speeding up the process.

As with any peer-to-peer network, the more people that are downloading a show, the faster you're likely to get it. As such, an episode of the BBC's no-nonsense Hardtalk current affairs show only had a few P2P sources and took around an hour to download at 22Kbps." type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355">