FoxBoom!

Dudes! Is this awesome? I think so!

The BBC’s iPlayer now works on the iPhone.

The website itself isn’t really iPhone-friendly for reading, but the videos are just simple H.264 streams which play full-screen. There’s an awesome blog post on the technical details if you’re interested.

Ashley Highfield is the BBC’s Director of Future Media & Technology, and his blog is awesome in its frankness.

In a post about the difficulties of getting protected media into the living room:

“Mentioning this to a very tech savvy colleague this morning, he replied that he downloaded programmes through BBC iPlayer, stripped the DRM (hence his anonymity!), re-encoded the file, burned it to DVD from his PC, then took it to his DVD player connected to his TV in the lounge.” [Ashley Highfield, “IP to TV: How?”

The blog also confirms that the BBC wanted to get the iPlayer onto the Xbox 360 but it didn’t work out, and are interested in getting content on the new Apple TV — now that it handles rentals, and not just lifetime purchases. But at least I can look forward to iPlayer on the Virgin Media television platform.

I’m really interested in these new television distribution models. Not least of which because my 40″ TV still doesn’t actually pick up any broadcasts, and it’s gonna be so much easier for me to plug in some kind of IP TV than to get an aerial fitted.