All New iPlayer

The BBC iPlayer and the BBC iPlayer Radio have joined together in a love embrace that sees the two share a single interface.

At some point tommorrow The now iconic BBC iPlayer interface has changed, and in my opinion for the better. iPlayer 2.0 has launched as a dual beta - with the original version staying up until all bugs have been ironed out.

It will be a merger of the radio player and the current television player with a raft of new personalisation ideas, interface tools and … RSS FEEDS!

There is a brilliant, Steve Jobs Keynote style blog post by Anthony Rose on the BBC Internet Blog outlining all the new changes with some pretty cool screengrabs as well.

Not sure for certain but it sounds like this will also be the point that the iPlayer Radio streams (at least the national ones anyway) go mp3!

You’ll certainly be able to rewind and fast forward all the way through - in the same way you can with pretty much any flash based media player.

Some interesting numbers from the press release include the fact that there have been over 100 million requests to view programmes since BBC iPlayer launched. In May alone, there were 21.8 million requests to view, some 700,000 per day on average.

The reason given for leaving the original version of iPlayer up alongside the new release is that the team expect the number of requests to double with the introduction of radio and then double again over the coming months.

There’s also going to be a bigger viewing window - which will mean a MUCH nicer viewing experience and more obvious Go Full Screen button.

But it’s the RSS feeds that excite me the most as it will allow for some pretty cool mashup applications.

The other exciting thing is a widget on the homepage that automatically remembers the last thing you viewed and how far into it you got. The next time you launch the iPlayer it will be right there waiting for you at the point you stopped it.

There is a down side to this though - if you’re married or living with your girlfriend - make sure the last thing you watched isn’t Page Three Teens and that you don’t stop it on breasts - otherwise you might have some difficult questions to answer if she is the next one to use the machine.

OR even worse - don’t do the above on your work laptop then get to a presentation and show someone how iPlayer works!!!

All the changes look pretty impressive and hopefully some of the widgets they’ve developed for the iPlayer can also be carried across to other sites - including the BBC Homepage.

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