[U]pgrading iPlayer's streams is a walk in the park compared to upgrading a national digital broadcast infrastructure and the hardware that receives it. Pair this with wireless broadband technologies such as WiMax, and DAB's lifespan could be cut shorter still.

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AVReview reports on Danielle Nagler's blog last week about HD programming this summer.

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Anything that comes from the keyboard of Tim 'Father of the Internet' Berners-Lee should be listened to. The BBC's Tom Scott sent this our way: Berners-Lee's report into putting government data online. In his conclusion, Berners-Lee cites the BBC's Programmes pages as a good use example.

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Silicon.com has published this neat 'Cheat Sheet' for Project Canvas.

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Microsoft's Bing blog has a complete run-down of the interactive maps in use across BBC Online. It's an impressive collection!

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Blogger Dave Cross logs his frustrations about some support he got from the iPlayer team on his blog. Thankfully he managed to catch 'Leonard Cohen: Live in London' in the correct ratio in the end. (And thanks to Jonathan for sorting it out at our end - Ed)

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Congratulations to the BBC mobile team who have won a "Meffy" award for "TV & Video Service" for BBC iPlayer on mobile.

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And finally, this will be my last post as co-editor of the BBC Internet Blog as I move on to other sections of the BBC. It's been a pleasure being on the frontline of BBC relations with the tech community. If you're interested, I blog here, and tweet here. I'd like to thank Nick Reynolds for taking me on, and wish the new editor, Paul Murphy, the very best of luck.

Dave Lee was co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

It's been a lively week for the BBC iPlayer. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones set blogs fluttering with his post about BT supposedly "throttling" iPlayer access. The Register picks up on the debate, also noting that Friday saw some unexpected (but now resolved) downtime:

Some BBC licence payers struggled to access the iPlayer yesterday due to problems with the Corporation's network connections.

Several readers contacted The Register to tell us that the online telly catch up service was on the blink.

"On Thursday 11 June 2009 there was a problem with our network connections. We worked hard to restore normal service as soon as possible and apologise for any inconvenience caused," said the BBC on its iPlayer website yesterday.

The comments provide some interesting reading.

Rory has posted a follow up post about the iPlayer here:

Now while other ISPs have grumbled about the impact of the iPlayer on their costs, I could not remember BT ever making such an forthright call for cash. And when I called the company, a spokesman made it clear that this was a new stance, and BT was happy for the world to know about it.

If you're not sure what all the fuss is about, Nevali has posted this entry underlining some of the issues while chucking in his own thoughts too.

Elsewhere, editor of the Radio 4 Blog, Steve Bowbrick, stumbles across the latest unconventional approach to security at Television Centre:

We haven't heard from Steve since.

Thanks to all of you who followed our Mobile Day posts. This Nokia E71 fan is particularly pleased with the news that the iPlayer is now available on their handset.

AllAboutiPhone were (somewhat) pleased with our live-tweet session with Jason DaPonte, but is left frustrated by DRM restrictions:

My next little bugbear is downloading of TV shows for offline viewing. This is supported on only a small subset of phones, and the iPhone's not one of them. This is because the Beeb has opted to use OMA 2.0 Digital Rights Management. In order to use this, a certificate has to be installed on the phone when it's built - apparently it can't be retro-fitted once the phone is on the market. Unfortunately the iPhone is not one of the phones that can use this sort of DRM; they use Apple's own Fairplay DRM instead.

Regular readers of these Interesting Stuff posts will know I like to highlight new minisite launches -- but this has to be one of my favourites: Transmission Impossible, with Ed and Oucho.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog

For all the latest news, you can follow Microblogger-In-Residence Kate Arkless Gray on Twitter here.

Kate explains more about the project in this post on the Radio Labs blog.

World Have Your Say has been getting in on the act too; asking which sounds are likely to soon be extinct. The whirrs of a 56k modem? The excruciating noise of a dot matrix printer? Can't say I'd miss them, to be honest.-- but then hearing the noises we associate with our first days on the internet already brings a tinge of nostalgia.

All the sounds will be plotted on this interactive map.

Kate will be appearing on Digital Planet tomorrow evening to talk about Save Our Sounds.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

The easiest way to check out all the Mobile Day posts is by clicking here.

If you're just joining us, here are some highlights from the day -- as well as some interesting links from around the web about what we've been up to.

Jason DaPonte had a blast taking all your questions over Twitter. We believe he may be the first BBC manager to hold such an event. You can read all the chatter here.

Also on Twitter, we were pleased that we had at least one happy customer today:

Then...

And then...

ElectricPig seem to be as excited as we are about the possibilities of iPlayer on Mobile:

Best of all though, he let slip that the tweaks included in iPhone OS 3.0 could be used to improve BBC iPlayer on the iPhone: "We use standard web technologies for our streaming. We're looking at whether we can make that work with the 3.0 iPhone software".

On All About Symbian they caught hold of the news of the E71 release almost immediately, after following our blog updates like a proverbial hawk:

The BBC has just launched a standalone iPlayer S60 application (v1.0.0!) for the Nokia N95 and E71. iPlayer lets UK users catch up on BBC programmes that have been broadcast in the last week or so and has previously been exclusive to the Nokia N85, N96 and 5800, available as a Web Runtime widget. Although no formal announcement has been made by the BBC as I write this, it's as good as a done deal, as this BBC blog post strongly hints.

Dave Lee is co-editor BBC Internet blog.

At 4pm, Jason DaPonte will be fielding questions, via Twitter, about BBC Mobile. Jason is the Managing Editor of Mobile.

To follow what Jason is saying, Twitter users should follow @bbccouk.

Remember, even if you don't have a Twitter account you can follow the conversation by just visiting the @bbccouk homepage. If you want to ask Jason a question without using Twitter, feel free to use the comments facility on this blog post.

We'll post a selection of the questions and answers at the end of the day.

Sadly, Fabio won't be heaping any such praise on the other half of the Internet Blog team. But I'm here now, so on with the (mobile) show.

Here's a video of Mark Kortekaas and David Madden. Mark is the recently appointed Future Media controller of Audio and Music and Mobile. David is Executive Producer of Mobile Media. He's showing off the now-launched Nokia N95 version of the iPlayer.

Dave Lee is co-editor BBC Internet blog

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

Jake [Archibald]'s second comment made me aware what happened. Instead of seeking the error in my own setup I immediately thought the BBC messed up (this is the typical developer bit I was talking about). The solution to the problem was easy to remember once I was aware of it.

(Here's the original comment thread.)

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The Guardian/PaidContent has a piece based around Seetha Kumar's recent blog about behavioral ad targeting, as does PC Pro. Comments on the PC Pro piece include this one from hiccup:

...there is absolutely no reason for the BBC to get involved in what is ostensibly a commercial battle between competing technologies.

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Now, I'm quite a proud internet user. I like to think I know what I'm doing. But, that considered, I have no shame in admitting I have no idea what this means: Querying BBC programmes in a Talis data store.

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h2g2, which celebrated its 10th birthday recently, is having a redesign. Read about and discuss the changes here.

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It's the obsession even video gamers are almost ashamed to admit: game soundtracks are generally rather wonderful (as anyone who played Daytona USA will agree. I hope). Destructoid says there'll be a Big Gaming Weekend on Radio 1 very soon:

For that weekend BBC Radio 1 and Xtra1, which I'm sure the UK readers of the site know, will be playing gaming music on the radio, presenting reviews and featuring gaming leaderboards between Radio 1's superstar DJs.

There is much speculation on that post as to the best game theme ever. I'd like to chuck this into the ring. We're hoping to get some more info about this very soon.

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The "feedback" topic on the BBC 6 Music boards has had to be suspended, provoking reaction from No Rock n Roll Fun and 6bombs.

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BBC Click's video of remote trojan horse hacking of computers goes down well with Graham Cluley.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

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Click's botnet experiment was a while ago now, but the IT security community is still debating on. Here, forum member iBot writes:

And by the way, Mark, you didn't "pose as a customer", you were a customer. This isn't just flirting with the darkside: it's more like paying the darkside for services rendered behind the bike sheds, then bragging about it to the tabloids!

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Steve Bowbrick -- editor of the Radio 4 blog -- gives advance warning of Announcers' Week. A blog a day from the Radio 4 announcers. Steve says:

Each day, for the whole week, I'll bring you a post from one of Radio 4's announcers - the preternaturally calm crew who sit at the eye of the network's daily storm of news and comedy and weather and documentaries and drama (and the shipping forecast) and make sure everything keeps flowing as it should.

The more eagle-eyed among you will have also noticed that the Radio 4 blog has had a makeover too, going to the full 1024 pixels wide design that we now enjoy.

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If there's one thing that bugs this blogger, it's people dismissing HD -- and adding "I can't really tell the difference". Fortunately, we now have this clip to show off and settle the argument once and for all. Breathtaking:

(Be sure to click 'HD' when you start the clip to get the full enjoyment.)

The clip is from the new BBC2 series, South Pacific.

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If you watched Question Time last week you may have -- in between booing and hissing -- been tweeting the night's events. The 'bbcqt' tag was raging with activity. Matt Wardman writes a decent analysis here.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

If a sport event is taken up by the BBC you can watch it live when it is on traditionally, and when it isn't on red buttonly, or catch up with it after it's over on BBC iPlayerly.

As anyone who will have watched Matt Le Tissier prance about on Sky Sports' Player Cam will appreciate, the red button hasn't always been that useful. This piece in the Telegraph celebrates ten years of innovation:

It was only for 2008's Beijing Olympics, however, that the scheme's popularity reached a point of near-universal acceptance. Deluged with sport, the BBC showed multiple live streams for disciplines it didn't have the space to show on its main channels, and millions of viewers fed - or discovered - at least a passing interest in challenges as diverse as open water swimming or the modern pentathlon.

For more Red Button related happiness, check out Andrew Bowden's entry on the Press Red blog.

Eamonn Fitzgerald writes a reaction to Jakob Nielson's praise of BBC News headlines:

And, anyway, what's so great about those BBC headlines? If we take Italy buries first quake victims and look at the URL we get this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7990029.stm. Now, let's take a look at a similar headline from the Daily Telegraph, which is not allowed to impose a tax on Britain's householders. Italian earthquake: more than 150 dead, Silvio Berlusconi confirms. Unlike the lazy Beeb URL, the one here, shows off the craft of an SEO artist, who has to make it work for a living by using elements such as http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5116660/ and Italian-earthquake-more-than-150-dead-Silvio-Berlusconi-confirms.html to satisfy the needs of the all-powerful spiders. That address contains not just information; it is crammed with the kind of words that will help rank the story.

The Chelsea Flower Show is just a couple of weeks away. We've already launched our dedicated minisite, and the show's special blog is now well and truly back in action.

And finally, congratulations to the BBC News team for scooping two Webby Awards this week.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

h2g2 is 10 years old! Which, in internet years, is the equivalent of a very old, very wise man. If you missed it, here's their post about the occasion.

Digital Spy reports that the Eastenders set is just too, well, old to be used for HD filming:

"What we've concluded is that everything is there for us in design terms for us to upgrade to HD apart from the exterior set, which is 24 going on 25 years old," Santer revealed. "And it shows, particularly in the brickwork on the Square and Bridge Street which doesn't pass muster on HD."

Who says life has to be all hard work? Jason DaPonte and team have been playing working with Lego. He explains in his blog:

We worked through a process where we used the Lego to model our own role; then how we operate within that role; the wider organisation etc, until we built up a large model of how our roles fit together and fit into the BBC. We also built aspects of ourself that we don't bring to work and used these to do some introspection into how we might (or might not) change the way we operated, etc.

You can learn more about Lego 'serious play' here.

Here's an interesting post in response to the piece on Anthony Rose and the iPlayer in the launch issue of Wired UK.

CNet has this piece by Ian Morris asking if iPlayer HD is good enough to watch on a HD television. They reach a heartening conclusion:

So, is iPlayer HD good enough for your HD TV? Yes, we think it is actually. The quality isn't perfect, but if you missed something, or simply don't have access to the proper HD channel, it's likely to be a godsend. We're hopeful that the BBC will continue to improve the quality.

The Knowledge Exchange blog has a summary of their 'A Collaborative Journey' event last week. If you're involved in any shape or form in academia or research you really should give it a read.

It's been a while since we changed our blog design, but some of us are still settling in. Your feedback is always welcome.

Sarah, the new Points of View message board host, is getting comfy in her new role. Here's a thread about all the places you can discuss BBC programming around the web.

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Without sounding too much like a certain UK newspaper, we couldn't resist posting this comment on ThinkBroadband by reader TonyHoyle:

What the hell is wrong with this country? The BBC/ITV collaborate to produce an open standard and Ofcom jump up and try to kill it.

Where was all this bleating about competition when Sky produced a proprietary EPG and closed encryption standard that effectively destroyed the open market on satellite hardware in this country? Nowhere. It's got nothing to do with competition and everything to do who has been passing brown envelopes.

That outburst was in response to this piece about Project Canvas.

Another Canva-related post we enjoyed from a while back was from this forum. Project Canvas in Plain English, we believe.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

We'll be posting Seetha's speech a little later on, but you can catch a live stream right here.

We expect Seetha to be on at around 12.15.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

On Monday we launched iPlayer HD. Nick Jackson, a University of Lincoln student, has blogged his satisfaction -- along with some frustration at the restrictions of broadband speeds in university accommodation.

Dan's Media Digest casts a critical eye over the launch -- and wonders if the new HD streams will be made available on Virgin set top boxes. The same thing is being discussed here, too.

WebTVWire gives a good breakdown of all the new additions here.

See a selection of news coverage about iPlayer HD here.

The Guardian reports that the £250 million surplus from the Digital switchover could be used to fund the Government's broadband-for-all scheme:

The BBC's licence fee deal includes £130m a year set aside for the digital switchover help scheme between now and 2012, when the UK is due to completed the move from analogue to digital terrestrial television.

However, last year the National Audit Office estimated that up to £250m could be left over from the digital switchover fund once the analogue TV signal is switched off in 2012, based upon lower than expected take up in the first region to make the move.

There has been a fight between Ofcom, Carter and the BBC over what to do with any leftover digital switchover cash. Darling's intervention suggests that the government has won and the licence fee money will be used to support universal broadband.

One commenter questions the 2mbps target, especially given the recent iPlayer HD launch:

[T]hat's not enough to get the best out of, say, BBC iPlayer now, with its impressive new hd options. strikes me as a waste of money to roll out something that's already on its way to being obsolete.

Steve Busfield isn't entirely convinced. When exactly does the digital switchover cash switch over?

More on the plans here and here.

The Radio 4 blog asked for thoughts on their site redesign -- and now they're acting on that feedback.

Up Your Ego is -- how can we put this lightly? -- less than impressed about Radio 4 putting a Webby Award graphic at the top of their pages.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

Picture: Wired UK

Rose, who had arrived three months earlier as the iPlayer's latest boss, thought that users would find the service too difficult to use. But first he had to make his case to the BBC's tired Future Media & Technology team. So, pulling a chair up to a computer, he asked his assistant to find her favourite BBC show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. "It was a disaster," Rose recalls. "It went wrong in ways we couldn't even imagine."

From a man who saved the BBC to a woman who has become a Champion. Seetha Kumar, the controller of BBC Online, is now our Online Access Champion:

Seetha will be tasked and resourced to make sure that the BBC plays its full part in helping more people take advantage of online services. The new role complements Seetha's current responsibility for running BBC Online.

The announcement of Seetha's new responsibilities was made at the Digital Britain summit. Read all the BBC related stories here.

Paul Brannan, editor of emerging platforms, has been talking about social networking and journalism.

The BBC Knowledge Exchange blog has a post introducing 'beebac', the network for media professionals and academics:

beebac is a space where academics and media professionals can find people and projects that interest them. It is a network for BBC staff, academics and industry partners. It enables you to find people and projects you want to be involved with, explore areas of mutual interest and exchange ideas and resources.

And in a pretty lenghty post, Yves Raimond from Audio and Music explains some of the latest additions to the Programmes pages.

'My real name is John Ravenscroft, although I have used the name 'John Peel' while working for Radio London," begins a letter to the BBC gramophone department in July 1967.

If that opening paragraph is enough to get your nostalgia senses tingling with glee, then I suggest you have a read of this brilliant article about the BBC archives by Jemima Kiss.

Finally, if you're wondering where iPlayer HD has got to, we experienced "deployment issues" last week. More soon. There's a message board discussion about HD going on here.

Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog, Future Media and Technology.

Alex Goodey: What's your reaction to the awards the BBC iPlayer has garnered in the past few weeks - four in total. You must be delighted?

Erik Huggers: More than delighted. They just keep coming in. it's a great recognition of the hard work of the team in FM&T, and of the fantastic programmes that the BBC's content division creates.

At the end of the day the reason the project was so successful in my opinion was a combination of great technology with great programmes, marketed in a way that consumers understand. It's the BBC working together and making a sea change in the industry.

AG: What comes next for the consumers, after a very successful first year you must feel like there is little else left to conquer...

EH: This is the tip of the iceberg. We have about half a million unique users using iPlayer every single day, but there's quite a few more people on the internet who haven't yet used iPlayer, so what comes next is we want to make sure we reach as many people as possible, number one. That's a drive for broader adoption of the iPlayer.

Secondly, we're working on iPlayer version 3. We're looking at a whole new look and feel for the service, and we're also going to introduce some new nifty little features, some of which have been in the iPlayer lab for a while, some of which are new altogether.

AG: We've been hearing a lot about open source recently. Why is it so important, and why is the BBC promoting it?

EH: In a funny sort of way, you get audiences not just to be audiences, but more and more people have capability in writing and developing software, and if you can embrace the power of the many to develop an application, that's a very interesting way of working. We can throw thousands of people at developing an application, but if you can do it in a way where people can build on top of what you put out, it'll get better adoption, it'll get more stable products, it'll be more feature-rich.

We've got a long history of doing that, for example we recently visited Kingswood Warren with Mark Thompson for the BBC R&D folks, and they have build a product called Ingex (automated tapeless production software). That's completely open-source software. We contributed it to the industry, it's getting adoption and people are building new features. So we benefit, they benefit. A very positive thing.

AG: Would you say open-source is an in-house move as well as an external one?

Can software spend be justified when free software in the open-source arena can do the job just as well and sometimes better than paid-for software?

EH: I think without a shadow of a doubt there is still a very important role to be played by paid-for software and even for software we end up developing ourselves.

If you look at what we're trying to do across the entire value chain some of the stuff has never been done before so you can't even go and buy it, even if you wanted to buy it, even if you wanted to get it for free, it doesn't exist yet so some of the - call it the line of business functionalities that are particular to our industry - you just cannot find elsewhere.

Now, over time that will come but I think we have an important role as a catalyst in that space and so what we try to do is try to find the right balance from a value for money point of view with an audience benefit point of view with what do we need for functionality to empower the business to get its stuff done. So sometimes that means we buy existing pieces of software and we do a systems integration job on it, other times we say gosh it doesn't exist yet and we have to build it ourselves and I don't think it's a straightforward answer - it really depends on what situation you're in.

Dispelling iPlayer myths

AG: Is iPlayer likely to be put into the public domain, open source, so the audience can start developing its own add ons?

EH: There's a common misconception as to what iPlayer really is.

iPlayer is not a bit of software that you can stick on a disk and give to someone - 'Here's your iPlayer'. What you see as a consumer is the least complicated thing of the entire service. The most complicated thing of the entire service is the back end, call it the engine room, the plumbing, making all of the proprietary systems that we have in place talk to each other, work with each other and get those workflows to actually work.

We've had many broadcasters from around the world call us to ask 'can we licence the iPlayer?' and we say 'we're flattered that you're asking us but the truth is we couldn't do it even if we wanted to'.

I think what we can do, however, is in the digital Britain response we have posed the idea of sharing iPlayer, in other words, could we help ITV set up their own iPlayer? So literally - itv.com/iplayer, so you go there you'd get the iPlayer but with ITV content.

So there is no such thing as putting it out there. What we could end up doing is a world where we make some of our own, we expose some of the APIs and allow others to build services on top of our services and those are things that we're absolutely thinking about."

Erik Huggers was interviewed by Alex Goodey