Not sure whether you picked up on an announcement a few weeks back that BBC, ITV and C4 are working together to provide a standard player for all their services. I assume this will be be based on the BBC version (i.e. Flash) and, once completed, I believe it will be one of the biggest changes to the way we look at TV in the UK. Imagine having a simple cheap set top box (similar to the one BT are using) using Linux based OS with the ability to watch and record terrestrial digital TV as well as being able to watch free and paid-for streamed “on-demand” programming from all 3 of the major UK programme providers via broadband. It wouldn’t be long before other content providers started to make their stuff available direct to customers same way and the current middlemen (Sky and Virgin Media) will fade into insignificance.

Incidentally I like the little visual clues that are being added to the Radio Player these days (e.g. the “Why has this changed?” and, (I paraphrase) “Why is everything broken?” from the database problems a month or two back. Shows the BBC can be open about iterative development.)

As an aside, I suspect the beeb are perhaps the only organisation keeping Realplayer afloat nowadays – I had some dealings with them in the past and most of the people who were there seem to have jumped ship to Google etc. And, despite the fact that Realplayer was quite fun to develop for, I’m finding the Windows Media plugin decidedly quicker and more reliable to use. With the move to streaming, I wonder if Real will still exist as a company in a few years time?

I’ll still use the horrible Kontiki thing, though, since I like to watch things on my telly. The quality of the Flash-based content is quite a bit lower, for obvious reasons I suppose.