...and this one even works on my Mac!
After having received heavy criticism for rolling out a download based video player which only worked on Windows, the BBC have now teamed up with Adobe and launched the beta version of their new Flash and FMS powered streaming video player, niftly names iPlayer (has Apple sued them yet?).
No longer need UK based viewers miss recent episodes of The Mighty Boosh or Spooks, as virtually all BBC programs are archived and available online for up to 7 days after they have aired.
As some of you may know it is compulsory in the UK (if you own a TV) to pay a yearly license fee (roughly GBP 100 or thereabouts), the so called TV License, with which the BBC is funded. A lot of money but it also means no advertising and on occasion quite reasonable programming, at least compared to German TV, whose private broadcasters have become unwatchable (even their websites look like the home shopping channel...).

While the iPlayer's content is only available to UK viewers (legally that is, we all know where to get our content from I presume) there are plans for an international version in the future. May I just add that restricting viwership to the UK seems plain stupid to me while the BBC's satellite signal can be picked up all over Europe anyway!?

Ok, I am going way off topic but take this away: having the BBC use Flash and FMS for their iPlayer is huge and gives our much loved platform a great push and massive exposure. There's also no need to log into the site anymore - it just works (even on Linux), as expected, where previously only users with Windows XP using IE were able to access the iPlayer's content (wasn't that a great idea). In this case it seems that common sense has prevailed, and that doesn't happen too often these days.