An interesting development yesterday:
The BBC is opening up the BBC
iPlayer to third party channels. The sharing of metadata from ITV, Channel 4, S4C, Five, SeeSaw and the MSN video player means that programmes from ‘rival’ channels can now be accessed directly from the BBC iPlayer website.
via BBC iPlayer brings in rival channels | Broadband TV News.
Essentially this is simply a set of links embedded in the iPlayer UI that exits to the various On-demand web services and metadata content search, but it pretty much presents a good single portal for UK TV.
Unfortunately I can only see this available on the web via PC and it has yet to be added to the Humax Portal iPlayer for example. When it does (and I can only believe when and not if), this really does raise the need to have pointed questions raised about what Youview is going to do different and will maturity on existing services outpace them?
