alasdair.info

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The unpredictability of BBC iPlayer

I love BBC iPlayer, it is much better that 4OD, or whatever channel 5 do, mainly because they listened and made it work for non-windows machines, and as a Mac user I like that.

So on Monday when I was out and unable to watch New Tricks I thought "never mind, I can catch it on iPlayer", except I cannot. It is "Not available".

The problem is I have watched previous episodes of New Tricks on iPlayer, so why not this one? Is this series or episode special? I do not know. I noticed a similar thing happen to Q.I., it used to be on iPlayer, but not anymore.

So I now conclude that I cannot rely on iPlayer to see programmes I have missed because the BBC may stop putting them up at any time, without any indication why. Not very "on-demand".

Alasdair

Update: The New Tricks website has a link that says "Catch up on the current series and watch the latest episode on iPlayer", only to then reveal that none of the episodes are available.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i've been googleing all week trying to find out why the latest New Tricks episode isn't available on iPlayer, and your blog post is the first thing i've come across that's mentioned it. I have watched all the previous episodes (and pretty much everything BBC that i like) through the iPlayer. It's really annoying because the episode isn't even re run on any of the BBC channels. I can't even find a torrent!

Unknown said...

I've just found out that New Tricks season 5 has actually ended. Guess I missed that bit of info because I always watch them on iPlayer and you don't get any 'between show commentary' letting you know whats coming up next week on the iPlayer. They're re running season 3 now in its time slot. not sure why that's not available on iPlayer though ??

Anonymous said...

Explanation here -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbiplayer/F7331806?thread=5855112&latest=1#p68439030