iPlayer to synchronise shows on PCs and phones

 

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By Barry Collins in Los Angeles

Posted on 28 Oct 2008 at 20:01

The BBC's iPlayer service will synchronise downloaded TV shows across all your PCs and mobiles, as part of a forthcoming integration with Windows Live Mesh, writes Barry Collins in Los Angeles.

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Microsoft announced today that it's making the Live Mesh service - which synchronises data across all your PCs and phones - available to third-party applications.

And one of the first applications to take advantage will be the BBC's iPlayer. The Corporation's head of online media, Anthony Rose, demonstrated a prototype version of the player at the Professional Developers Conference today.

It featured a Silverlight-driven desktop application that automatically synchronised shows downloaded on one PC with all the other devices on the person's Mesh network, including Macs and mobile phones.

"When I take out my cell phone, the programme has already been synched," Rose said. "And when I press the play button on my smartphone, it automatically picks up from where I left off [on the PC]."

Rose boasted that the BBC iPlayer already accounts for 10% of the UK's bandwidth at peak periods. Quite what the already disgruntled ISPs will make of iPlayer synchronising shows across all the user's PCs and mobile devices awaits to be seen.

Favourite shows

The prototype iPlayer also featured several social-networking features, such as lists of the most popular shows watched by friends on your MSN Messenger list, and updates on what shows each of your contacts has watched and downloaded.

iPlayer users will also be able to rate scenes from the show as they go along, resulting in a cringe-worthy "Lovemeter", that shows the parts of shows that people like most.

"Next year, your friends are going to choose what you watch," Rose proclaimed.

Mesh integration

Microsoft also demonstrated examples of Live Mesh being integrated into other desktop applications.

One photo-sharing application allowed people to edit their photos on their home PC and have the edits automatically update on those of friends and family.

Photos taken on a Windows Mobile phone could also be instantly added to a holiday album, for example, and instantly sycnhronised with friends and family.

Microsoft is encouraging developers to integrate such features into forthcoming apps.