As we reported last week, the BBC's video download service is only available to a limited number of people right now. That number is expected to increase gradually through the full scale rollout of the service in the fall.
However, it seems the BBC didn't think the restricted number of viewers was as big a deal as they're viewers do. In fact you'd have to get about halfway through their press release before reading that "It will go live to the general public in open Beta on 27 July, allowing the number of users to increase over the summer in a controlled manner, before a full marketing launch in the autumn."
According to a BBC spokeswoman, part of the reason for the unusual "open beta" was that the iPlayer team isn't able to send bulk email.
In a twist to the interoperability controversy and accusations of Microsoft bias, it has emerged that iPlayer will run on Windows Vista PCs, and not only on XP as the BBC suggests. However, the BBC is Blocking Vista iPlayer downloads using the user agent string which allows web servers to identify browsers and the operating system they are running on top of.
Source: The Register
Written by: Rich Fiscus @ 31 Jul 2007 20:50
