The Beeb’s had huge success with the iPlayer, but it’s not sitting still. Tomorrow it’ll unveil a massive re-design, making on-demand telly even easier to access, and in higher quality too.
Click on the image to the right, or on our gallery below, for a close-up look at the new design. It crams in radio alongside telly, and packs much more programme choice into a single screen.
The new iPlayer also pumps out programmes 25% larger than before, at 640 pixels wide (compared to the previous version’s 512 pixels).
A re-designed menu puts content under single categories, regardless of its type. So if you click on comedy, you’ll see results for TV and radio on one single page. Of course, you can switch this off – so you’ll only see TV, or just see radio. It’s entirely up to you.
There’s also a ton of new personalisation options. The iPlayer now remembers which shows you’ve watched, and serves up a “last played” option, so you can dive back into a show you’ve got halfway through.
Even better, since it knows which shows you’ve watched, it can tell you when a new episode is available. For fans of series, it’s like an on-demand version of the Sky+ Series Link. There’s even the option to subscribe for show updates using RSS, so you’ll instantly be alerted when they’re online.
Anthony Rose, head of digital media technology at the BBC said: “As you can guess, we’ve got a huge amount of work to do to pull this all together. iPlayer gets five million page views per day now, which we think will double when we add radio, and then double again over the next few months.
“Our plan is to “dual run” the new site alongside the old for a few weeks while we make sure the server can handle the load, listen to and act on your feedback, iron out bugs, etc.”
Out June 27 | £free | BBC
