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Is live BBC TV coming to the iPhone?

By Matt Radford on April 4, 2009

BBCI saw on All About Symbian yesterday morning that you can now stream live TV over wi-fi to certain phones (Nokia N96 and 5800) via the BBC mobile site. Although it’s low quality, this is pretty cool. I tried it on my iPhone, but no luck. It appears that Realplayer streams are being used, which rules out access via the iPhone at the moment.

Checking through the FAQ, the Beeb also says:

Over the coming months, we are hoping to make it available on even more handsets and over 3G networks.

I’ve contacted them to find out if this includes the iPhone. Any live stream would have be to transcoded into a format that the iPhone can play – meaning .mp4. But I think it’s a fairly safe bet.

Why? They have an existing commitment to the iPhone – as demonstrated by the early roll-out of the iPlayer service. The BBC are also required by the conditions of their funding to be platform-agnostic. So hopefully it’s just a question of when.

  • http://mymindsays.co.cc/ Suju Krishnan

    Hi Matt,
    Sad to hear that.Is there a new iPhone this June?

    Suju.

  • Iain 117

    Wouldn’t mind catching Top Gear while out and about! Hoping this comes sooner rather than later 😉

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    It would be excellent to get live BBC TV over 3G. DVB-H is not needed. But I’ll probably skip Top Gear and watch The Wooly Liberal Half-Hour instead 😉

  • http://www.usablecontent.co.uk Gerry White

    Personally, I would prefer offline watching – that would definently make me very happy, being able to download and watch top gear etc.. on the train / move woudl be fantastic … If this happens I will regret buying the smaller 8g version!

  • Iain 117

    Yes but Gerry isn’t that essentially the iPlayer?

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    @Iain
    It is, but you can’t download shows to the iPhone, only stream. Well, unless you use ipl2iph on a jailbroken iPhone…

  • http://www.usablecontent.co.uk Gerry White

    @Iain – apparently DRM issues, i.e. Apple being a bit closed about what they use, have stopped the BBC from being able to create a download and play later type of thing for the BBC iplayer – and whilst watching the odd tv program when I am in WiFi area is useful, my personal view is that most of the time I would like to kill time is when I am away from a WiFi that I am allowed to hook up to!

  • Jon Smith

    Help! When i load the iplayer website on my iphone now it is just a black, blank page. Any ideas please guys?

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    Sorry Jon, it’s working fine for me over 3G and Wifi. I’m not sure what that problem is…

  • Julian Treasure

    I have had the same problem (plain black screen when trying to access the iPlayer page) for some time now. There are a few others on the BBC forum. I can’t find anyone with a solution on the web. BBC tech support email were not helpful. I can see other web pages fine but the iPlayer page (and also the FAQ page ok the iPlayer site) are just black screens. I’ve deleted cache, history and cookies in Safari to no avail. Frustrating.