Hello, I'm Dan Taylor and I'm the new Head of BBC iPlayer.
I'm ionate about listening to and responding to from s and read the BBC's online log over my breakfast every morning.
The iPlayer feature that has most frequently appeared in this log has been our desktop s solution, BBC iPlayer Desktop. Many of you have not been happy with the service, so one of my first jobs was to try and implement a solution. Today, I'm pleased to announce the release of a new desktop s solution, BBC iPlayer s, which aims to address the underlying cause of many of those issues.
BBC iPlayer Desktop relied on s ing and installing Adobe AIR. Unfortunately updates to this underlying technology often resulted in issues with the BBC iPlayer Desktop, with s reporting that they had lost ed programmes and/or were unable to any new programmes.
BBC iPlayer s doesn't require s to and install Adobe AIR and consequently, shouldn't be vulnerable to issues resulting from updates to Adobe AIR.
We've also taken the opportunity to simplify the application, focusing it on the core tasks of the and offline playback of BBC TV programmes. So, for example, we haven't rebuilt the Series Record functionality in the new application, which introduced significant complexity and was only used by a minority of s. Similarly, we haven't rebuilt the Live TV and Live Radio areas, which couldn't be used offline and duplicated functionality on the BBC iPlayer website (minus great new features like Live Restart).
The Parental Guidance Lock has been integrated with the BBC iPlayer website (so you don't have to set it up twice, or two separate s) and is now triggered at the point of rather than playback.
We've also simplified the mechanism on the website so it's less vulnerable to browser updates and we've consolidated the links so they now only appear on episode pages, in line with the experience in our mobile applications.
Unfortunately, we've had to discontinue s in the Windows Media format as it was no longer cost-efficient to produce these s.
I appreciate some s will miss these features but I hope you'll agree that having a more reliable solution is worth the trade off.
From today, it will no longer be possible to the old BBC iPlayer Desktop client but any programmes already ed should continue to be playable until they reach their natural expiry date.
More information on installing and using BBC iPlayer s can be found on our Help pages.
Do let me know what you think of BBC iPlayer s in the below comments and don't forget you can also programmes using our mobile and tablet applications.
To preempt a likely question ("What about s for radio">recently approved proposals from the BBC Executive to offer BBC radio content for and we hope to roll out s for radio in 2014.
Dan Taylor is Head of BBC iPlayer, BBC Future Media
