When was bbc iplayer invented

But Coates says the criticism had much wider causes. How much money did it take them? How many people? What were the arguments about? What else didn't get made? Those are the real issues. By the middle of , Highfield and his team had produced a beta version of the iPlayer, whose interface let only Windows users access programmes. Rumoured to have cost in the double-digit millions of pounds, it wasn't yet ready - three years after being announced.

Greg Dyke, for one, told wired that, had he remained director general, the iPlayer would have been ready two years sooner. But some things were beyond Highfield's control. From , the renewed Royal Charter stipulated that the BBC Trust, its governing body, would test all new projects for "public value".

It could take nine months for it to test the iPlayer's impact on the commercial sector, its value for money to licence-fee payers, and so on.

Also being tested was the trust's faith in Highfield as the corporation's technology guru. The rapid take-up of broadband in the UK had also changed the game, affecting videoon- demand.

Anthony Rose is 44 years old, not too tall, with thin glasses, long, bushy hair and rapid-fire speech. Growing up in South Africa, he was building circuit boards at The BBC found him while he was working for Kazaa, the file-sharing program that introduced many a teenager to illegal downloading. Rose's plan to launch a legal music-download service, Altnet, met a multitude of lawsuits.

Rose recalls. Where are my stock options? Highfield emailed everyone in the Future Media division stating that Anthony Rose would be arriving on September But the iPlayer's provisional launch date was December 1. He was in the office until midnight every night for the first six weeks. Rose brought momentum. Almost immediately he secured the rights to show BBC content in Flash, the industry-standard Adobe software for streaming video used by YouTube.

Rose kept refining the interface to make it simpler, concentrating on "easy wins" by getting the iPlayer on to Macs, the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

And the statistics tell of its success: over a million daily users, playing 1. He immediately began innovating, experimenting and organising, and with the help of his newly appointed chief engineer, Peter Eckersley, the service began to expand. The first edition of The Radio Times listed the few programmes on offer. It also provided advice for budding radio enthusiasts, and numerous advertisements by the fledgling radio industry, offering the latest in radio receiving technology.

It was to become one of the world's most popular listing magazines. Game of Thrones: How to watch online. UK TV air dates. Films on BBC iPlayer. Images on VODzilla. Permission is required for any further use beyond viewing on this site. Remote control icon created by Bjoin Andersson from Noun Project. Online milestones quickly followed: that Christmas Day, the Queen's Christmas Speech was shown live online for the first time. Burgeoning sites for sport, weather and children's content quickly followed, the latter transforming a generation's use of media.

By , BBC's online service was reaching almost 12 million users a month. Then in December , BBC iPlayer launched, now the most popular video on-demand service in the world.

Finally, this year BBC Online delivered the first comprehensively digital Olympic Games attracting a record-breaking 55 million browsers around the world.