BBC iPlayer, currently in a closed testing environment, is to launch four months ahead of schedule on the 28th of July. For those of you who missed our earlier report, here's an explanation of the service from Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC:
"BBC iPlayer is a free catch-up service for UK licence fee payers. Your favourite programmes from all the BBC's network TV channels will be available to download over the internet, and watch on your PC without advertising for up to a week after transmission."
The BBC are not planning to go it completely alone, however.
Speaking to Virgin Media in the last week, they seemed confident that a deal would shortly be sealed to make them the first television service to provide BBC iPlayer offerings as part of their On Demand service, which is proving popular, especially in the wake of announcements about the Bond back catalogue.
YouTube is already on board, and other names that have been raised as "in discussion" are MSN, telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo!, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo.
Versions for Microsoft Vista and Apple users are in development, which makes the service slightly more limited online. As such, partnerships that allow greater accessibility to the content (particularly that with Virgin) look set to widen the net and include customers that might otherwise face restrictions.
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