There's a very interesting pice on the iPlayer in today's Media Guardian by the paper's former TV critic Gareth McLean. It's well worth a read in full.
And he's right - the iPlayer is changing the way that we all watch, consume and enjoy TV - and not just BBC programmes either.
While Sky Player, 4OD and (snigger) ITV.com are in competition with the iPlayer, they are also benefitting from the huge marketing muscle that was put behind the launch of the iPlayer (ok, the third launch of the iPlayer - but then nothng really works until version 3 anyway...). Every single BBC show on every BBC channel had an iPlayer promo. Perhaps someone who's a media buyer could put a value on that advertising for us - I certainly can't even begin to.
What the BBC has done in launching the iPlayer is shift the public consciousness. TV on demand, on a computer, in bed on a laptop, on the train on my iPod is now easy, convenient and fun (and not difficult, techie and hard). This is VoD for all of us however we chose to live our lives.
Gareth asks what's next for the iPlayer. The question should really be, what's next for the market that the iPlayer has created? And because here at Download Monkey we always like to come up with the answers to the questions you're asking, and while we already have reviews of the major VoD services, we're currently busy doing a head to head of the big key VoD players. We'll be looking mainly at the the things that we think now matter - ease of use, quality of picture and content available.
We'll try and make it as easy as possible to see at a glance which service it's right for you - ie: should you be spending any of your precious time even bothering with it? Because Gareth, that's where we go next with this. Mainstream...