So although it sounds great - it's actually not that useful. If I have a wifi connection most of the time that's for a short period at a cafe or something either that or I'm at home - in which case I'll use my laptop with the 13" screen over the iPhone

The BBC made Iplayer compatible with the Iphone a year ago - has it really taken them a year to add one other phone to that list?

Why is this application specific to the N96, and not S60/Symbian phones in general (of which there are about a squillion)? What about other platforms like Windows Mobile - developing an Iplayer app for either S60 or WM would add many more users overnight.

The Iplayer is a license-fee funded service, and should not be used as a niche feature in the marketing of one or two high-profile products like the Iphone and N96. Either make it a truly mobile service available to as many different phones as possible, or just don't bother - leave it as web only!

we get it workin gon Linux and OSX first, rather than bloody mobile phones!

and I won't think that the beeb are just being paid to do these and actually are delivering their service to licence payers like me.

Maybe because there's more people with a Symbian mobile phone than there are who use Linux ??

Are you 100% sure about this ?

Symibian mobile phone users who actually use it for net too ? ahem i doubt this to be a real factor

Most of these people carrying these phones are doing it to impress their mates more than likely they would use their PC to browse web than a 2 inch screen to browse

For all you bafoons out there when the net came out there was 3 platforms Windblows Linux and Macs

Good Software creators Create for all 3 bad s/w writers make it for what they use and ignore rest..

Regardless of wether i use Linux or windblows I pay tv license so hey for my money i would also like to view BBCILacker on my Linux Desktop Cos I will refuse to support Microsoft

Comprende ?

The N96 is the latest Nokia S60 phone, but I'm not aware of any great advance in S60 itself that makes this phone capable of using Iplayer while the others weren't. S60 is well established and has long been capable of dealing with all manner of multimedia, and DRM for that matter.

Windows Mobile is still completely ignored and Iplayer-less, despite having Windows Media support built in - why?

It just seems the BBC are only interested in jumping on high-profile bandwagons and pushing the sales of new phones rather than actually providing a public service. You just know they'll have an Iplayer support for Android before the first Dream has left the factory, and yet the perfectly capable phones that TV licence holders have in their pockets right now are being ignored. Why?

Paris, because she knows how to distribute video.

From what I got from this article this is just for N96 phones, not Symbian phones on a whole. In which case im fairly sure that there would be more OSX/Linux computers out there than N96 phones.

The iPlayer came to the iPhone/Touch on March 7th this year, so it was actually only 6 months ago.

I do not work for the BBC.

Paris, because she's wrong too.

Seems like a massive waste of development time if they're only going to allow this to work with the Nokia N96. There are a ton of Symbian S60 phones out there, including Nokia's own very popular N95 series, that would benefit from this.

I know that it creates an additional marketing point for the N96, but there's nothing like screwing over current customers to put them off buying your product in the future.

I think that my blog post here: http://linuxcentre.net/?p=16 may shed some light on the upcoming N96 download service. I've determined that the stream appears to be H.264 128kbps video and AAC 64kbps. The streaming protocol is RTSP with a 3GP container. The resolution is 320x176.

I've already had it streaming and downloading on Linux with vlc and I've had others report it works out-of-the-box on several other devices including mobiles and windows :-)

I could be looking at the completely wrong stream but it seems likely to be the right one.