The BBC’s project to make its enormous back catalog of quality British TV shows available online was ambitious to say the least. But due to colossal mismanagement and a lack of vision and flexibility, its iPlayer app is clumsy, unpopular, and pretty much redundant. I imagine a Dilbert-esque scene as the 400 people on the project all met and shared conflicting ideas for the bloated monstrosity, and even after spending almost $10 million, (4.5m pounds), the sucker just doesn’t work. So what spoiled it? Was it the download-only platform? The low resolution and bad encoding? Or maybe it was the time bomb DRM scheme that detonated your episode after so many days? Maybe we’ll never know, because the entire project has been reworked and the team pruned to a lean, mean team of 15. The 2nd-gen iPlayer is yet to be seen, and whether it will integrate with the BBC on-demand set-top box is also pure speculation. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that you should stick to your Ab-Fab DVDs for the time being.
Why is the iPlayer a multi million pound disaster? [The Register]
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