91Èȱ¬

Great news! I am thinking of getting an ipod touch just so I can listen to Test match Special at work. Also, does the 91Èȱ¬ sport player work now or will it? I am a frequent listener to Mark Church and Surrey cricket, and that will be the final decider for me if I can listen to that on an ipod touch as well!

It does look great, my biggest request would be to be able to de-select certain channels programs, for example I'm never gonna watch anything from the 91Èȱ¬ children channels, so being able to make sure those programs never appear on the front page would be very welcomed.

I was expecting the iPlayer to be draped in the new pan-91Èȱ¬ site layout, and I love how that has been combined with the existing iPlayer brand. I also love how you are integrating the station identities as well - I wasn't sure about the new 91Èȱ¬ Radio logos when they were first launched, but their flexibility and iconic nature works really well in this context.

Will this release coincide with 91Èȱ¬ Radio being streamed using a flash player, rather than Real Audio too? The updates to the Radio Player are what I'm really looking forward to in this respect.

Increased screen size is very good news.

Two things I would like to see:

1. An iPhone/iPod touch interface, similar to the 91Èȱ¬ Podcasts that is already available

2. I'm a dual screen user at home and would like to be able to stream iPlayer on one screen in full screen mode. At the moment if I click on anything in another screen it drops out of full screen mode.

I also hope that the new Radio iPlayer drops the annoying "Skip 5 mins" and "Skip 15 mins" and we can scan around at will. I found it so annoying listening again to the Chris Moyles show that I stripped the RealPlayer url out of the current Radio Player page and play it straight from RealPlayer where I can listen to it how I want.

I have nothing but praise for the 91Èȱ¬ and its iPlayer, but how about come compatibility with macs. I don't always have internet on my laptop and it would be great to be able to watch some of the best TV programs on the go and not have to risk them lagging sometimes!

Also how about a downloadable 'iTunes' style service so consumers can watch the content on their mobile phones and ipods with the 30 day termination...

Version 2.0 looks great, a good improvement on the first release. However will you also be looking at releasing to other platforms such as Xbox, PS3 and perhaps other handheld devices?

And I bet it still won't be available on a Mac!

Surely a large potential audience for your service use Apple. What about compatability with the mac?

A desperately needed feature is a listing alongside each programme which states when it aired.

For example, Doctors: Season 10 is listed only with the episode titles. It would be much more helpful if alongside this there was "Episode aired at 1.45pm, 22nd May 2008 on 91Èȱ¬ One" or similar.

The large version of your first screenshot (when you click on it) is actually no larger than the small version. It's just a low resolution image made bigger - perhaps you made a mistake when putting it up?

Either way, this is all great news! Will podcasts be integrated into this? I'd like podcasts to be expanded too, ideally to cover drama, but I doubt that'll ever happen :(

Also how about linking in with /programmes?

you should make the iplayer, or certainly programs, to be available to download on the to the psp, yet have the thing, where it stops working after a week

Is there any plan for a review of accessibility for viewers outside the UK?

Whilst I'm pleased you continue to improve the iPlayer (and you are doing a good job by the looks of it) may I ask that you don't forget about improving it on all platforms, not just the website.

Despite claiming that the iPlayer is now available on Virgin Media it does not have as large a choice of programmes as the website, this is most notable with the sport which despite Euro 08 and Wimbledon currently in progress has only one programme available, The Super League Show. The usability and navigation of it is also nowhere near as good through Virgin Media, nor does it contain the features such as "Most Popular" let alone the new features you talk about in this blog. I cannot speak for the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone as I have not tried the iPlayer on them but I am probably right in thinking it is the same situation.

Basically, please do continue to improve the service, it is a great credit to the 91Èȱ¬ and you are deservedly recieving the praise for it, but please make sure you focus on improving every platform, not just online. Or at the very least, don't brag about the ways you can use the iPlayer if it is not really the case that it's an equal service with everything.

Looks nice, but is this the beginning of the end of the 91Èȱ¬'s RealPlayer and WMA streams for radio? Millions of internet radios using Reciva.com's interface depend on these formats, for live listening and listen again. Please Beeb reassure us that you're not going to switch off these streaming formats?

Soo glad we can finally get a mashup. Out of curiosity - does the RSS support streaming direct from our apps?

Any news on improving the service for iPod Touch / iPhone users? At the moment it's very hit and miss whether the programme you want will have been converted to H.264 video. I know a lot of money is spent and effort made behind the scenes retrieving and converting tapes, but sometimes it seems like 50 - 75% of programs just come up with 'unavailable' on Apple's mobile devices.

I'd second AlexisV's comment. It'd be nice if we at least understood why some things can take 4+ days to be encoded to H.264, and why many things aren't encoded at all...

I'm pleased to see you will be integrating Radio and TV on the iPlayer. I hope we'll be able to download ANY radio programme and transfer it to a MP3 player. So many radio programmes are currently only available by streaming and not on podcast. I like to be able to put a whole radio series onto MP3 and listen in sequence during a long car journey.

Well done to the Beeb for this innovative development. The new iPlayer looks fantastic! Streaming on the Mac is good. Downloading to the Mac would be so much better (as quite a few posters have already pointed out).
Just finished listening to the cliff-hanger of a match (England vs New Zealand) on TMS.
Will that service be available on the iPod Touch or iPhone, for example?
Can't wait...

Looks good - particularly like the idea of beter adaption to larger screens and higher res.

The biggest feature I would like to see is the ability for me to filter programmes i am never interested in, so they dont normally display in iplayer.

I can't count the number of times I am looking to see whats on and having to wade through programmes I cant stand to find a few interesting ones...

Nick, while I appreciate knowing that a Mac download service is still in the works, and hasn't been dropped, UK Mac-using licence fee payers would appreciate a little more information on it.

"Work in progress" is a very vague term - has a secure solution (or rather, something as secure as Microsoft's DRM) been found to enforce the demands of the rights holders, or are you waiting on negotiations with, for example, Apple or Adobe? In which case I'm sure that the hordes of UK Mac users will be very willing to demonstrate to them just how important a download iPlayer is to us.

Is it working yet? Is the code still being worked on? Is it ready but for a DRM solution? How will it work? How will it look? Will it integrate with Front Row, or be otherwise controllable with an Apple Remote? Will we be able to browse the iPlayer with an Apple Remote? Will it still be here by the end of the year?

I realise that the 91Èȱ¬ may be presently unable to answer many of these questions, but I'm sure that there are some you could - and although there may not be enough for a formal press release, it would be great if you could make some blog posts about how it's all coming along.

Thanks,
Sam

I would like to see the range of programmes being expanded to include films and the third party stuff you show, eg US series. If I miss a day on auntie, only a proportion of that schedule is stuff that would be currently available via iPlayer. As I'm continually missing Heroes at the moment, this would be a bonus.

And who knows, perhaps I can finally get a chance to catch an epidode of "Murder, She Wrote" :-)

@sammyjayuk - this is exactly what I was wanting to know - they have been on about a 'work in progress' since the start of the year, yet they have been able to make these advances on the Wii and the like - I believe you can get it on Virgin too?

What I would also like is for the media to be playable on the AppleTV. I understand that when Take2 was release some 91Èȱ¬ blog said they would try to get the software on there. Not heard anything since.

How far are you with that one 91Èȱ¬? Apple have a downloaded movie service now that is downloaded via iTunes, then sync to iPod, then times out after a certain period or when I have watched it. Why can you not use that model?

I think what quite a few posters are coming back to for Mac users is 'it's streaming! - what more do you want?'

Well I for one would like to be able to download it to my Mac and watch it on my laptop when I am away from an internet connection - that would be so much better for me and I am sure a lot of other users.

Please 91Èȱ¬, can you at least provide us with some more information on this? We have been waiting for more than 3 words "work in progress" since the start of the year! A little openness goes a long way i think.

It would be appreciated, yet I feel that to get the downloaded service, I have to source a windows machine but why should I? I pay my licence fee the same as other platform users do. Yet I am paying for something that I cannot receive (please don't jump on the band wagon streaming comments).

Streaming doesn't work that great for me - very blocky, stuttery and not very watchable in my personal opinion, yet the downloaded version would eliminate that.

Can you tell us a bit more?

So I was writing another comment, saying that how really, we should be grateful that the 91Èȱ¬ is doing so much for non-Windows platforms. Then I went to Channel 4's site to check that their in-browser catch-up definitely didn't work on a Mac - and got sidetracked and tried their online radio player, which does. Or should - I was skipping around in a show when Flash crashed Safari, and lost what I was writing.

I think that my point would be illustrated more effectively anyway, by simply listing which non-Windows platforms each broadcaster's catch-up service works with:

Download:
As yet, no broadcaster offers a free catch-up download service that works on anything but Windows.

Streaming:
91Èȱ¬: Mac, Linux, others (Flash 9, Flash video); iPhone, iPod touch (QuickTime, H.264); Nintendo Wii, others (Flash 7, Flash video)
ITV: Mac (Microsoft Silverlight, WMV?)

Here, we can see that the 91Èȱ¬ offers by far the most cross-platform support - extending beyond the computer into consumer electronics devices.

ITV comes second, by using Microsoft's Silverlight to show how even using only Microsoft's technologies a streaming service can be Mac and Windows compatible. It isn't compatible with anything else, though. I don't rightly know what video codec ITV's service uses, but I imagine it'd be WMV.

Channel 4 deserves special mention here, and some sort of award, for having three Windows-only ways to watch catch-up content, and nothing else. The 4oD download service has been around for ages (relatively) and a while ago streaming video was added based on WMV DRM, but you still needed to install the 4oD software to use it. Channel 4 have recently added free streaming catch-up TV to their website, but that too uses WMV DRM and relies on Windows Media Player 11!

So it does kind of annoy me when people moan here about the 91Èȱ¬ not supporting Mac users at all, since the 91Èȱ¬ actually set an example that other broadcasters should be following. I still want to know about a Mac download service, though!

Sam

Quote
# 5. At 5:05pm on 25 Jun 2008, honeypea wrote:

Looks nice, but is this the beginning of the end of the 91Èȱ¬'s RealPlayer and WMA streams for radio? Millions of internet radios using Reciva.com's interface depend on these formats, for live listening and listen again. Please Beeb reassure us that you're not going to switch off these streaming formats?


# 16. At 5:50pm on 25 Jun 2008, NickReynolds wrote:

honeypea - watch this space.

Nick Reynolds (editor, 91Èȱ¬ Internet blog)
Unquote
That sounds threatening, rather than optimistic, Nick. Can you reassure we Reciva users abroad that after all these wonderful changes, we'll still be able to get the Beeb live and listen again streams on our internet radios?
Thanks,
Anne in Geneva

A few more thoughts, if I may:

The 91Èȱ¬ eventually want to make HD content available through iPlayer. That's all well and good but many Windows PCs sold in the past few years are completely incapable of playing HD video. I would even go so far as to say, given the amount of sub-£300 Celeron/Sempron machines that the market has been stuffed with, that in fact MOST Windows PCs are going to seriously struggle with HD.

On the other hand, every Intel-based Mac Apple has ever sold (with perhaps the exception of the Intel Core Solo Mac Mini) is more than capable of playing any HD video, up to 1080p. Some PowerPC Macs are also likely to be capable of 720p.

I am very concerned that an HD download service is going to be Windows only, at least in the beginning and perhaps for some time afterward. This would be an even greater shame than the eternity Mac users have been waiting for a download service, because if you were able look at HD-capable PCs vs. Macs you'd see a much larger proportion of Macs than you would by just looking at f.ex. server logs.

Sam

These changes look great, especially with the new on demand radio formats.

Will the 'last played' and other information allow users to build up a profile, perhaps an API to retrive information on last watched or favourite shows for a specific user - much like the web services ?

I liked the suggestion about being able to deselct catagories. In this day and age with cookies, temp files and other little commodities hidden deep within our computers, i think it would be a good idea for us to be able to have favourites. e.g Dr Who.

So when u log in, it automatically searches for the latest info on it, what new progs there are etc. Regular watches would use and enjoy this feature and saves them having to search.

Love the iPlayer 2.0 look and the integration of radio, TV and the RSS feeds.

Just regarding the 91Èȱ¬ Internet Blog itself (this page etc). Can you please put the article title in the HTML title tags?

FF3's "awesome bar" searches your page title histories, but all of the 91Èȱ¬ Internet Blog pages are called "91Èȱ¬ Internet Blog", rather than the standard "Page name | 91Èȱ¬ Internet Blog".

In the last picture, the one with the Doctor and Martha, have a look at the second More like this... picture.

/blogs/bbcinternet/img/iPlayer_itempage_large.html

A mistake, or hope for the future for halfamo & co.?

Will we still get the option to watch TV at the smaller size? I like to have iplayer in the corner of my screen while I'm working, and at the larger size it'll take up too much space to do that.

Actually, what I'd really like is to be able to resize the video area to any size - since when I go full screen on my computer it gets all jerky, but at, say, double size, it should (I imagine), work just fine.

As someone who travels abroad frequently, it's frustrating to be locked out of content when not in the UK. Please look into some kind of registration scheme (if you can't do it with cookies) whereby I can permanently identify myself as a UK licence payer and download and/or stream while in other countries.

Oh, and as so many others have said, please sort the Mac download piece out - it's strange that you can implement DRM to make your programmes available for purchase via the iTunes store, but still can't sort it out for iPlayer.

Another small 91Èȱ¬ miracle.

Brilliant work once again. I love the Radio being integrated with the iPlayer interface, now - particularly if you finally get rid of that Real Player - or provide an alternative for "Listen again" shows. RealPlayer might have a wide platform, but it will never go on my PC due to it's privacy concerns and bloatware components.

Having just invested in Freesat HD, and seeing the ethernet port on the back, am a little dissappointed your guys might not have been coding for that. When will this be coming? (I have to invest in Freesat because the 91Èȱ¬ have positively neglected the Isle of Man in the digital switchover - even after that (late 2009) we're only going to receive a selection of channels)

And I think the various posters on here are right in highlighting the wide range of platforms the 91Èȱ¬ support. Web, Virgin iWhatever and Wii is a significant effort but perhaps have forgotten that this represents a significant obligation towards supporting each platform in its own right.

So a comment to mac users, you are able to receive WMV content, so let's not criticise the 91Èȱ¬ for your decision to purchase a minority platform. ;) 91Èȱ¬ regularly provides free advertising for Apple products (partly due to Job's clever branding of a product that had been around for years (iPod) making it into something other than "just" a brand).

Looks good.

My only concern is that the font size is still quite small- as I predominantly use iPlayer on Wii the size of the text, coupled with the low resolution of my SDTV set and being on the other side of the room (And, admittedly, my own shockingly bad eyesight) can make navigation difficult, especially as zooming in on a video causes the system to slow down.

To we Australians, the television part of the Player is just a tease. Whatever we click on, we're told "only for U.K." even though we can listen to as many radio programs as we want (with the exception of 'Pick of the Week' - why is that?).

But increased quality of radio can only be a good thing.

So is today the day then Nick? Lots of dashing around behind the scenes?

Thats looking good.
I like the larger video size, but would it not be possible to have a button (alongside the fullscreen button) to open the file in a popup. I usually like to have the programme runnign while doing something else, so having a popup i can position on the screen would be great.

It might be a little trickier, but ahving the popup scaleable (so that the video scales, not just the window) would be brilliant too.

I like the sound of channel filters, so you filter out certain channel's programmes.

Are you going to have a schedule (like in What's On) so it is easier to find programmes which you know were on sometime on tuesday night, for instance.

And as for Heroes and American Dad (and other US shows) coming to the iPlayer. Is this going to happen, and is their lack of them on here due to licensing problems from fox, etc? Also is this a similar thing with sports?

Is there any plan to bring in the podcasts, and the audio/video stuff from news/sports too.

The cookies to remember your details is nice, but would it not be possible to also have a users bit, so that you can log in at different machines and it will still remember what you have wathed, what favourites you have, etc (and maybe even set up a users profile to share your fav programmes with your friends).

sorry if it seems i am just thinking up loads of things taht it is missing, the list was linger before this announcement though. iPlayer 2 looks great. Good work

I love the iplayer and find it so much easier to use than other tv channel players (commercial channels where you have to endure ads and you can't find a place in a programme, but have to watch a whole chunk).

I adore Radio 4 and Radio 7 iplayer, so the thought of having all the Beeb stuff in one place is just great.

My one criticism is the fact that iplayer uses Kservice from Kontiki, a peer to peer application that continues to use bandwidth after the iplayer has been shut down. Most people probably don't realise this, but it does have implications in terms of download limits.

Luckily, I tend to stream my programmes rather than download, but it's still a little disconcerting.

I don't think this has been answered but will I be able to listen to LIVE radio via my iPod Touch and iPhone?

2.0 looks great thus far!

I assume TV will be up and running on the touch/phone straight away as its a front end change?

@sammyjayuk Obviously you are a Mac user, but trying to scare people into buying a Mac by passing off bad info is not what this blog should be for. To correct you: All PC's bought in the last three years and most in the last five years will be capable of receiving and displaying HD content. The PC has for many years been way ahead of what TV is able to produce. The reason Apple started using Intel chips is because, basically, they were better than what they were currently using. If any hardware is not capable of displaying HD it would be Apple's as many of their display systems aren't capable of showing the full 16 million colours required by HD (they use an anti aliasing system designed to fool the user into seeing colours that aren't there - in fact they have been sued over this!). For the past ten years there has been no reason to buy a Mac except for personal choice - the PC hardware is actually better and more reliable in most cases (plus of course it's cheaper). The PC also has a much larger market share which is why, I suspect, the 91Èȱ¬ aimed their iPlayer at it initially.

@The 91Èȱ¬ - I think a system of adding or removing TV and Radio sections from the main page would be excellent. Somewhat like Google's News pages. Ideal.

NTT.

All of the above sound like great additions. Although it would it be possible to add a comments section to programmes? Or at the very least a link to the appropriate place in the 91Èȱ¬ forums to discuss the latest episode of Doctor Who/The Apprentice/I'd Do Anything.

Also you mentioned creating RSS feeds for 'mashups'. Does that mean I could create a personalised RSS feed for the latest series of Torchwood/Top Gear/Ashes to Ashes? Rather than having to create separate feeds for each of these shows. If not, it should at least be possible to 'subscribe' to these shows, and have them appear on your personalised home page. (Much like getting Sky+ to automatically record your favourite series)

I also think the 'More Like These' bar should be changed to indicate what users who watched this programme also watched (much like amazon). Thereby giving users better quality recommendations.

Nick, thank you for the reassurance that we who are abroad will still be able to listen (and listen again) to 91Èȱ¬ radio via wifi internet radios.
Personally, if there were a system of registration and/or payment for people abroad who do not pay the television licence fees in the UK to be able to use the iPlayer to hear the radio, I would happily subscribe to it. I shouldn't think I'm alone in that!
All the best,
Anne in Geneva. (You can call me Gumrat!)

Please get the sound louder !!! It's way too quiet of the current version.

I hope you don't shove loads of extra dynamic objects onto the player page so that some viewers suffer flash slowdown when they try to watch a video.

@NTT: Yes, I am a very satisfied Mac user and perhaps should have been more clear about that. You certainly pay a premium for a Mac, and while a Windows PC can indeed be specced to perform at the same level as a comparable Mac for less, the difference in price starts to close as you either pay in money to have pre-installed software removed, or take the time to do that yourself.

I think you over estimate how much most people are prepared to pay for a computer though. That, or you're being remarkably optimistic about the performance of a £300 laptop - many of which have problems playing even SD video smoothly. I must admit that I haven't tried playing HD video on either of the £300 laptops my family own, and will try some 720p H.264, and maybe some 1080p if I can find some, next time I'm home.

I'm not saying that there aren't cheap, HD capable PCs out there, but you would have to look. I recently recommended a £400 Acer small form factor desktop PC, with 2GHz Core 2 Duo and 19inch widescreen TFT, and it's a wonderful little thing! It certainly cost far less for the package than it would to get just a Mac Mini, and then have to add monitor, keyboard, etc. If I had the money, I'd probably get one from the same range (sans monitor) to use for MythTV. However, I was very lucky to find it - most everything else in that sort of price range had a Celeron in it, and even then I really had to push to break past the £300 mental limit.

I'm certainly not trying to scare anyone into buying a Mac though! If somebody could justify the extra money, then I do think that they offer an overall better and more satisfying computing experience. Recent figures from the US show that Apple command about two thirds of the market for $1000+ computers, and although I'm sure the numbers would be different over here it does show that when paying anything more than a small amount of money for a computer, Apple is certainly one of the big fishes in the pond.

With regards to the colour issue, it is certainly disappointing that Apple choose to use those sorts of panels, but I've seen banding in all but the most expensive flat-panel monitors, and to be fair it only really becomes an issue when accurate colour reproduction is absolutely essential - it's completely unnoticeable unless you're actively looking for it, Apple are just an easy target, guaranteed to garner publicity (Greenpeace, incidentally, are guilty of doing this repeatedly). While we're on the subject of panels, Apple generally use panels that are of higher resolution that the rest of the industry - 1280x800 is a standard resolution for a 15.4inch panel but Apple use that same resolution in their 13.3inch computers, while their 15.4inch MacBook Pro has a resolution of 1440x900.

You're completely correct in saying that Apple switched to Intel because PowerPC just wasn't good enough. IBM were unable to create viable dual-core PowerPC CPUs, and also couldn't make a G5 for Apple's notebooks, meaning that they were stuck with the G4. When Apple made the switch away from the Motorola 68000 architecture, I'm sure the PowerPC satisfied Apple, but even as far back as the inception of Mac OS X Apple was worried about what PowerPC would offer in future, and Mac OS X has always, secretly, been able to run on x86 processors.

You claim that PC hardware is better and more reliable in most cases, but when "most cases" means all the £300 laptops out there (and it does) then unfortunately that isn't the case. That however is more of a problem with the price point, Apple certainly couldn't build a reliable laptop for that sort of price. Even when you get up to around £700, things still aren't perfect - a friend of mine has an HP laptop with a built in webcam, but it's never worked for more than a minute and has even been back to HP and they can't make it work properly. Not to mention the completely braindead design decision of putting the headphone socket on the front edge of the machine, where it's continually getting knocked by wrists and became almost completely unusable after about 9 months.

Anyway, this is entirely the wrong forum to be having this discussion in. You seem knowledgeable, if a tad misguided, and I'm intrigued to see whether we could find some middle ground, but alas this is not the place.

Sam

Obviously a sidetrack point, but I'm not sure where this statement has come from: "the PC hardware is actually better and more reliable in most cases". Seems blatently false to me.

I thought RSS feeds were going to be part of this release?

I'm looking at the beta and can't see them.

Nick,

I hate to keep bashing away at this, but in the new iPlayer beta I now see for instance at:

/iplayerbeta/radio/bbc_radio_four/entertainment

that all Listen Again material seems to be playing in Flash, not mp3 format as reported by The Register - unless I don't know how to see that it's mp3 underneath the Flash front page or something? This makes me very concerned that the old RealPlayer/WMA formats that we all listen to on our Reciva Internet radios will be kept going "for now" to cite the posting in March over at RadioLabs:

/blogs/radiolabs/2008/03/streaming_radio_online_your_co_1.shtml

- but that they might later be dropped citing budget cuts and figures of how many people using the new Flash format iPlayer, say (because that's all they see available).

I don't mean to flog you to death on this, but I think we all deserve more technical details of what formats are proposed for both live and Listen Again radio, and some commitment to keep Internet radio-friendly streams available for the long haul, else this will just run and run. I just bought an internet radio, love it, and would be horrified to think that the 91Èȱ¬ might cut access to it in the foreseeable. Thanks in anticipation of some techy stream details.

As Heroes is listed in the More Like This console on the last screenshot, are we to guess that its comping to the iPlayer soon?

I'm sorry to sound disobliging - but what a MESS! It's incredibly unwieldy and difficult to find old programmes that you've missed (I'm only talking about radio here, can't speak for TV as am abroad and haven't looked). Also, the listings are wrong and show programmes currently being repeated on 91Èȱ¬7 as being on Radio 4.
I find it completely counter-intuitive and wish you would keep the old 91Èȱ¬ Real Player on for much longer, it's far simpler to use. Unless I've missed something obvious and am doing it all wrong?
Well, that's my opinion, but I'm not a techy, just a listen againer.
Sorry about that.
Anne in Geneva.

Whatever happened to creating an n95 version of the iplayer? I thought this was coming at the same time as psp and wii versions?

The iplayer needs to stay in full screen mode on a second monitor. Every time I browse the web on my laptop monitor it flips back to the browser window view on the second monitor. This is useless. Is there a setting somewhere to keep it full screen?

Also you need a filter for tv or radio when browsing catagories. Who wants to sift through all the radio to find 1 or two tv programs?

Also it keeps freezing half way through on high quality and when I restart it begins at the beginning.

I'm new to the whole concept of iPlayer in its new guise. Until some months ago I was able to "Listen Again" without subscribing to a service which also gave access to tv programmes.

Like many contributors to these blogs, I have no tv or tv licence. Unlike most if not all of them, I have no desire to watch any tv programmes whatever.

The tv licensing people have recently indulged in one of their periodic bouts of intimidation against freaks like me, in whose existence they cannot quite bring themselves to believe.

I would like to be an iPlayer-For-Radio-and-Nothing-But user. I can find no evidence that such an option is available.

I presume that subscribing to iPlayer in the normal way triggers an e-mail to the Tv Licensing Authority alerting them to the fact.

Can a strictly radio-user avoid the hassle that this inevitably would entail?

in a form that is obvious to even the least intelligent of investigators

Delete that last line