Almost makes me glad to pay a licence fee... almost. (BBC iPlayer)

Member Name: gayle04

Product:	BBC iPlayer
Date:	15/01/09 (105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great sound, great picture, reliable, easy to use

Disadvantages: sometimes content is unavailable

BBC's Iplayer is by far the best "TV online" site / player out of the main terrestrial channels in the UK. It shows the vast majority of programmes that are broadcast on BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC News 24 (as well as many radio shows) and not only this, but the player actually works!!

I have lost track of the amount of times I have sat down to watch something on ITV catch up or Five on demand and after a couple of minutes, the video has just frozen completely or keeps stuttering. This never happens with Iplayer anymore, and the only problem I have ever had with it is when sometimes you click to watch something and a message comes up saying "this content is currently not available". This is very rare however, and to be honest, I would rather know from the start that I can't watch something rather than it going wrong half way through.

The Iplayer reminds me quite a lot of windows media player, it has controls at the bottom where you can pause/play, change the volume or fast forward / rewind. In my experience, all of these controls work perfectly and never cause the iplayer to malfunction when you press them! I can't comment on the download site of iplayer as I have never used it, I always just watch the videos on the iplayer site, streamed.

The ease of use for the iplayer is excellent, I never have any problems finding what I am looking for and getting it to play. You can choose to browse by genre or by the day it was broadcast, and you can choose whether to view TV only, radio only or a mixture of the two. You can also search for the title of any programme you want to watch.

One of the best features of iplayer is that it remembers where you got up to in a programme if for some reason you have to switch off midway through. This saves you faffing on for ages to try and locate the exact point when you stopped watching it! Iplayer also keeps a saved list of the 10 last programmes you watched or listened to on the homepage (which can be cleared if you don't want anyone to see you're a secret eastenders fan!).

The sound quality and video quality is, as you would expect, not quite as good as TV but it is perfectly watchable, especially as you can now watch many programmes on iplayer in high definition. As long as your computer screen isn't huge and you have an ok set of speakers, you will have no problems.

Overall I would have to agree with another reviewer in saying that this is the best thing the BBC have ever done with my licence money. I hope that the other channels will buck up their ideas because iplayer really has set the standard.

Summary: Iplayer really is the one to beat, pull your socks up ITV!!

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