The BBC has launched an app that brings the British network's TV shows to Apple iPads in 11 countries. Unfortunately, the U.S. isn't among the first round of countries to get the global iPlayer app, which brings a "curated" set of BBC content to iPad owners.
The iPlayer app is free, but to watch shows users will have to shell out €6.99s a month (about $10), or €49.99 (about $72) for a yearly subscription. The initial launch includes only countries in Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. Plans are in place to bring the global iPlayer to the U.S., Canada, and Australia by the end of the year.
The global iPlayer has some differences from other iPad video apps like Hulu Plus or ABC's video player. Notably, it can stream shows over 3G connections as well as Wi-Fi, and users will be able to download and store shows for viewing while offline. The BBC is said to have worked closely with Apple to make this possible.
"When we were doing our user testing, the use case was picking six shows before going on a long journey, and leaving them to download to the iPad overnight," Mark Smith, the global iPlayer launch director at BBC Worldwide, told London's Guardian. "The way the [iPad] works, though, is it hibernates and stops you from doing that: you wake up the next morning and only half a show has downloaded. We have managed to override that functionality, and Apple are comfortable with us doing that."
Subscribers won't have access to the entirety of BBC's on-air offerings, however. BBC Worldwide is said to have hired a team of editors to "curate" the content on the iPlayer, picking which shows to put on the app. It also give them to go beyond the typical genre and title browsing by creating themed collections around subjects and events. For example, for the long-running sci-fi show Doctor Who, collections surrounding specific Doctors are available.
"This is not a catch-up service: this is a video-on-demand service," BBC.com managing director Luke Bradley-Jones said in the Guardian report. "We will have content from the last month, but also the best from the catalogue stretching back 50 to 60 years."
While the content at launch will be the same for all 11 countries, the BBC has the ability to tailor the content of the app to meet the different demands of each region. This will likely factor more highly in the introduction of the global iPlayer to the U.S., where licensing rights for TV shows can be more complicated. According to reports, once the BBC works out the rights issues, the iPlayer content shouldn't affect the company's offerings in iTunes, Hulu, and Netflix.
"We see the global BBC iPlayer very much as another 'Channel' operating in Western Europe," BBC spokesman Alex Fulton told PCMag. "By adopting windowing strategies for our content, we are able to ensure that our broadcast partners and Channels around the world are able to entertain their audiences with our shows."
From: PCMAG.COM
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