iPlayer annoyances
Jul. 25th, 2008 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI'm not vastly impressed with the new iPlayer based version of radio player.
The removal of programme listings from the pop-up play, linked to from the station home pages, feels like a seriously retrograde step. It certainly complicates the process of finding recently broadcast shows. And no, the More Like This feature, nice though it may be, doesn't come close to compensating.
All of this wouldn't be quite so much of a problem if the iPlayer radio pages were as reliable as the original Listen Again, but I find that they seem to spend far more time buffering up data then they do actually playing anything. This may, of course, indicate a problem with my setup but given I don't have problems with other streaming sites, I'm inclined to blame the Beeb.
And also, what's with the annoying station identification messages prefixed to the Radio 3 live stream? It feels like yet another example of annoying BBC branding, like the "BBC News for Radio 4" tag appended to the R4 news bulletins last year in a clumsy attempt to strengthen the brand of BBC News.
The removal of programme listings from the pop-up play, linked to from the station home pages, feels like a seriously retrograde step. It certainly complicates the process of finding recently broadcast shows. And no, the More Like This feature, nice though it may be, doesn't come close to compensating.
All of this wouldn't be quite so much of a problem if the iPlayer radio pages were as reliable as the original Listen Again, but I find that they seem to spend far more time buffering up data then they do actually playing anything. This may, of course, indicate a problem with my setup but given I don't have problems with other streaming sites, I'm inclined to blame the Beeb.
And also, what's with the annoying station identification messages prefixed to the Radio 3 live stream? It feels like yet another example of annoying BBC branding, like the "BBC News for Radio 4" tag appended to the R4 news bulletins last year in a clumsy attempt to strengthen the brand of BBC News.
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Thanks for the feedback
Date: 2008-07-27 07:58 am (UTC)In terms of buffering - we've just launched a link marked "Dial-up modem" - see it in the footer here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00cqbrw . This then uses the 'old' RealPlayer links. However, I'm interested to know what browser and what connection you have, so that we can look into it; particularly, if you could confirm that the iPlayer works for telly.
Finally, I'll look into the Radio 3 "annoying station identification message" for you.
James (BBC)
PS: please accept anonymous posts - it's a nightmare navigating through LiveJournal's OpenID system!
Re: Thanks for the feedback
Date: 2008-07-27 08:24 pm (UTC)I'm not really complaining about the usability of iPlayer itself. Rather, I suspect my problem is that because I made heavy use of the Radio Player and I was used to being able to find archive programmes from the pop-up live radio window, I expected the iPlayer to work the same way.
As to buffering, I'm fairly sure I was using Firefox 3.0.1 over an 8Mbit/s ADSL. I haven't had any problems with the TV side of things and, so far at least, I haven't been able to duplicate the slow buffering problem. I wonder if, perhaps, someone else on my street was doing something unspeakable with the bandwidth on Friday evening? Anyway, I'll keep an eye on things and see how they go.
And anonymous postings? Back on. I'm not really sure why I disabled them in the first place.