The Stage

BBC to improve online radio quality in iPlayer shake-up

Published Wednesday 25 June 2008 at 16:20 by Scott Matthewman

The BBC’s on-demand radio services are to get a major revamp as the Corporation prepares to release a combined TV and radio version of its iPlayer service.

Many audio streams will be stored at a higher quality, with some services equivalent to the Corporation’s stereo digital radio broadcasts or many typical MP3 sound files. The BBC has also secured agreements with music rights holders, including PPL and record labels, to enable fast-forward and rewind capabilities for on-demand repeats involving music playback.

The changes will replace the BBC’s existing standalone radio player with a design that presents available radio and TV programming on the same page. The iPlayer home page will be redesigned to present featured radio programmes and easy links to live streams of the BBC’s radio channels.

New personalisation features will remember the last programmes watched or listened to, and allow users to automatically resume playback from the point at which a show was last accessed. Additional navigational tools include schedule-based listings, which will for the first time show when new programmes will become available and which shows are not included in iPlayer for rights reasons.

The television viewing pages of the iPlayer are also to be revamped, with a larger screen size and clearer controls for viewing videos in full screen mode.

Since its official launch in December 2007, more than 100 million videos have been downloaded or streamed via the BBC iPlayer. The radio player currently delivers more than 17 million hours of live and on-demand audio every month.

The new service will be available as a beta version, running alongside the current TV and radio players, from Thursday and will replace them completely at a later date.