When is the BBC iPlayer not the BBC iPlayer?

12 March 2009 | By Nigel Walley

There is a rule in life that if something walks like a duck and sounds like a duck it must be a duck. It’s a good rule, but I’ve been struggling with a slight variation on it. What if someone really big and important repeatedly tells you something is a duck and has gone to the trouble of painting the thing to look like a duck, but every time you look at it, it still doesn’t walk or sound like a duck?

The duck in question is the TV version of iPlayer. The BBC and Virgin have made a great fuss over the fact that ‘iPlayer is now available on Virgin’. But however much I’ve tried, I can’t make it waddle or quack.

What’s actually available on Virgin is an alternative menu structure to the main Virgin on-demand menus, painted to look like a duck — sorry, like iPlayer. These menus have been created using the red-button software already present in the Virgin set-top box. Apart from the fact they’re black and pink, they don’t look or behave anything like iPlayer.

First, it must be pointed out that, despite the implication from the BBC at the time, BBC catch-up programming has been on the Virgin system since it launched and is still available through the main menu. If you want to see yesterday’s Cash in the Attic you can go to the main A-Z menu and you’ll find the programme. Admittedly the amount of BBC content increased from 50 to 400 hours’ worth when the new screens launched, but all this was immediately made available through the Virgin menus as well. The iPlayer menu screens therefore don’t offer the only route to BBC catch-up content in the Virgin TV VoD system.

Second, the TV iPlayer isn’t connected to the internet or to the iPlayer servers. The iPlayer-branded menus point at the same episode of Cash in the Attic on the Virgin servers that the Virgin-branded screens do. Once you start playing the video, the Virgin VoD controls take over. This means none of the presentation twists or web functionality we’ve come to expect from the web iPlayer exist on the Virgin service.

Third, there’s a strange absence of TV channels (and radio channels). On the TV version, almost all channel references have been removed.

None of this would matter if not for two things: that the BBC keeps telling us this is the iPlayer when it clearly isn’t, and more importantly that it keeps telling us people are using it when they clearly aren’t.

The BBC has taken to calling any viewing of a BBC catch-up show on Virgin as ‘TV iPlayer use’. However, Decipher surveyed 1,000 Virgin homes to ask how they access BBC catch-up shows and over 80% reject the black and pink menus and still use the Virgin A-Z menus. The BBC claims these people as ‘TV iPlayer users’ when it’s clear they’re simply Virgin on-demand users who have chosen a BBC show.

I’d like to think the organisation that brought us Life on Earth would be able to spot the difference between a duck and a cuckoo.

Have your say

Please do not complete the following form field for security reasons.

Name

E-mail

Comment

Post as

Anonymously

Display name

I have read and agree to the terms and conditions