It has been a tumultuous twelve months at the BBC, with scandal after scandal finally leading to a new Director General in the form of Lord Tony Hall who took over at the helm in April, replacing George Entwistle who had held fort for just fifty days.
At a gathering at New Broadcasting House in Central London this morning, Lord Hall laid out his visions for the future of the BBC, and part of this he revealed some significant upcoming developments for iPlayer in 2014.
BBC Store: iPlayer goes commercial
‘BBC Store’ will be a commercial, online-only service, letting people buy TV shows to keep forever. So we’re talking permanent downloads here, something that has been rumored previously.
Hall didn’t reveal how much this will cost, whether it will be per-download or a monthly subscription, but details will be revealed in on this in due course.
“We’re moving from being catch-up TV, to online TV,” said Hall. “Next year, we’re going to reinvent iPlayer.”
Moreover, iPlayer will be moving from 30-days catch-up from 7-days as standard, something that’s currently only enabled if you make shows available offline. And Hall says many of the shows will be available on iPlayer first, before going on to broadcast TV – so iPlayer is being moved front-and-center here, rather than being a secondary service.
“This is going to be a bold era of BBC innovation,” said Hall, before adding that users will be able to create their own TV schedules, fitted to their own schedules.
A new service called BBC Playlister will also let users tag and listen to any music they hear on the BBC, with Hall mentioning partnerships with YouTube and Deezer and more, letting people save and listen to all their music across devices. Again, the exact details of this weren’t revealed, though we will endeavor to eek out the finer nuances of what this actually entails.
