You may remember, if you’re one of my more hard-core readers, back in the old blog, I used to make a few posts about the past present and future of the iPlayer. Well it turns out that it’s still growing rapidly into one of the main parts of the BBC. While competitors made an effort to launch their online services, like ITV’s Catch-up service (which nobody uses, due to the strict requirements) or the boom of 4’s 4od (now a part of Virgin Media or online), the BBC is still focusing on the iPlayer’s growth.

Most, if not all, of the content broadcast by the BBC is now being pushed online, either by the less successful peer-to-peer service or via the all-new Flash interface. But wait, the intuitiveness doesn’t stop there! They’re still in search of new platforms for you to access their content from, the last main is the Apple iPhone platform. Their latest platform is (I admit not even I saw this one) the Nintendo Wii!

However, there are downsides. You will need to purchase the Internet Channel, worth 500 Wii points (~£3.50) to use this feature, and those that do only have access to Flash 7. This is one of the main problems the BBC’s Future Technologies team across in its development. Modern internet broadcasters no longer support Flash 7, as it still uses the Sorenson Spark encoders. This provides a far worse picture quality, separate encoding, and bigger files sizes. Rather than compromising on response speed and download time, they chose to lower the quality, so don’t expect the crisp near-HD qualities you get on Mac or Windows (or the new iPhone platform).

Having said that (yes there’s more), they are apparently working on a new native platform, perhaps the iPlayer Channel for the Wii, that involves paying less, and utilises some higher quality encoding (perhaps the ON2, shipping in more recent versions of Flash).

Obsolescing of television as we know it

Yes, the internet is taking a (rapidly) increasing share of the broadcasting market, and perhaps all broadcasting will be sent over the internet, but one things for sure, it will not happen for a long time. There are many investments in alternative broadcasting technologies going on that you may not even know about, for example few predicted the introduction of the satellite into home entertainment. Another thing I can be confident about - although it’s more than likely that television is going to be on-demand, there will always be traditional channels.

Television will never leave, as far as I can predict, the internet will simply compliment it, along with the latest talk about desktop, media and internet integration due to AIR, iPlayer, Live, Windows 7’s modular approach, iTunes, and the list goes on.