By 
Daniel Danker of the British Broadcasting Corporation has just announced the company’s plans to release an Android version of their BBC iPlayer app this week. It comes a year after an initial iPad offering that BBC admitted wasn’t their best shot.
Here are some of the key features Danker highlighted in their blog post:
- Watch live TV and listen to radio (not previously widely available on mobile devices)
- Access the BBC’s full catalogue of catch-up programmes; seven-days’ TV and radio on demand as well as series stacking (as you get on the web)
- A simple and intuitive design with high picture quality and personalised favourites (making the most of the touch-screen UI, and a popular feature on the website)
Unfortunately – due to the requirement of Adobe’s flash plugin – the application will only be available for Android devices with version 2.2 or higher and will need powerful processors and strong WiFi connections. He didn’t say whether or not the app would work without a WiFi connection, but it certainly sounds like one is recommended.
It’s a strange limitation considering so many other applications are able to provide quite-decent streaming media experiences over the slowest of 3G signals. BBC iPlayer for Android will be available in the Android market by the end of this week. [via Android Forums]
Sweeeeeeeeeeet.
Looking forward to this! Oh yes!
Bout bloody time!
Streaming Top Gear? Nice!
Streaming iPlayer radio over 3G via the desktop version of the iPlayer site works for me, it just switches to a slightly lower quality stream.
Shame this a ‘cheap’ effort that uses flash like the PS3 version, they can play BluRays in 1080p but haven’t got iPlayer HD when they’d be more than capable.
The Nokia apps (Pre Symbian^3, low-res via RSTP) are able to stream via 3G on Vodafone and Three. Unless the networks have said ‘high res streams are a no-no’, they should still allow the new app to work.
Why the BBC persist with flash rather than changing their iOS stream from .mov to .mp4 I’ll never understand.
Progress is progress, though.
I guess this will be region locked though? Might (=definitely) be worth to mention.
All that effort and they still need Flash. I’ve been running beebplayer (no longer maintained, I believe) since Donut came out for my retired G1…
TOP GEAR.
Looking forward to it, but I’ll still be keeping beebplayer…
I read another article on the telegraph website about this…due to be released on the 10th and will not work via 3g – only wifi
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8311646/BBC-to-launch-iPlayer-app-for-iPad-and-Android-on-February-10.html
Bring it on who says streaks are to big perfect for watchin F1
Let’s hope the audio/video doesn’t get out of sync like all the other players I’ve tried.
Yes! Another Top Gear fan here! But…. will this be limited to those in the UK?
will it record????
Finally, I can enjoy live tv and radio on my phone when I have a wifi connection! Which is, more often than not, when I’m at home.
This is great news for those of us who have the latest and most powerful smartphones, and broadband connections, but don’t own a television, radio or computer.
I’m so glad the BBC stopped those awful beebplayer and myplayer apps from streaming BBC content over wifi AND 3G on ANY android device, and gave us this instead. It’s a massive step forward.
This is going to be useless, its going to be another app that just takes you to a web portal and play the videos through flash, unlike the ipad/iphone version which will have the native streams.
X10 users f**ked once again..