April 20, 2009

HD arrives on online iPlayer

It's a week late, but the online version of now has BBC HD content today (Monday). Not everything's there (a cursory glance found that No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was in HD but Mad Men and the recent Doctor Who special weren't) but it's a start. Picture quality on the streaming service wasn't ideal on my (2omb) connection but an improvement on the regular and higher quality streams. I'd expect the download version to be better - certainly I wouldn't want to watch the streaming versions on an 8mb or slower connection.
Two interesting blog posts on the BBC site: BBC iPlayer goes HD, adds higher quality streams, releases iPlayer Desktop out of Labs and BBC HD: Joining the BBC iPlayer family

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The speed test on the BBC site seems to suggest 3.5Mb is enough for the streaming, so unsure why you are having problems on your 20Mb connection. My 10Mb had no issues.