"iTunes for the broadcast industry"

According to the Guardian today Ashley Highfield, big boss in charge of New Media for the BBC wants the new iMP (internet media player), the tool that will let people in UK watch any show from any BBC channel for up to seven days after broadcast, to become "the iTunes for the broadcast industry".

This has been reported, blogged, commented on in forums, chat rooms and in letters to the editor the world over, the iMP is something we have been expecting for a long time and it really is the BBC doing what it does best - walking on the razors edge of development and innovation.

This time though there is a major development according to the Guardian the BBC is looking for 5,000 broadband users from all over the UK for a massive trial starting in September.

Anyone interested in taking part should email imptrial@bbc.co.uk, including their name, contact details, age and postcode. Although as of writing this e-mail, I haven't been able to get the e-mail address to work.

This trial will offer extra features not available in the previous smaller trial and in addition to what is available in the radio player, including a "series stack" option, enabling broadband users who start watching a series part way through to catch up on previous episodes they have missed. The player will also allow users to filter programmes by channel and select subtitles.

The trial will have 190 hours of TV programming and 310 radio shows.

The biggest revolutionary thing about this player, on top of the fact that a major international broadcaster is making programmes available for free on the internet is the fact that it uses peer 2 peer technology for the distribution of the shows, meaning people share the load on delivering the large video files instead of the BBC having to pay for large servers and massive bandwidth charges.

News Sites talking about this:
BBC Presses on with TV Downloads (BBC)
Britain's BBC to Trial TV Service (Stuff NZ)
BBC to Test Internet TV Downloads (p2p Reactor)

Bloggers talking about this:
Bite Size Tech News
PaidContent.org

Related Tags [Technorati]
BBC Downloads Television iMP TV p2p