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This feature has been available on Windows for over a year, while Mac users have only had access to the seven-day catchup service. The problem for the BBC was the lack of Mac support for Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM, which the corporation says has to be deployed to meet the conditions set by the BBC Trust when it gave permission for iPlayer to go ahead.

That

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problem has been solved by adopting Adobe’s relatively new AIR platform, a cross platform technology that has enabled the BBC to put iPlayer on Linux desktops as well as Macs.

A beta version of the player is available from bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/bbc_iplayer_desktop. The BBC expects the final version to be available in February 2009.

Anthony Rose, the BBC’s head of digital media technology, said that the corporation has also been working with ISPs to help reduce the cost of the additional bandwidth that iPlayer requires. Working with UK company Velocix, it has developers a system to enable ISPs to locally cache the most popular downloads. iPlayer will recognise when a cached version is available, so that ISPs can serve it locally, rather than having to fetch it each time from the BBC’s servers.