Watch TV on your iPhone with the free BBC iPlayer - Eastenders, Dr Who and more!

On the 27th July 2007, BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) launched the BBC iPlayer - an free internet service offering streaming of all TV shows broadcast on their channels within the last 7 days. Keeping up with technology, they launched an iPhone compatible version on 7th March 2008 and boy is it great!

You can access the BBC iPlayer on your iPhone or iPod Touch just by visiting their website at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ by WiFi connection (the EDGE connection is too slow to stream video).  When you try and access the iPlayer website, it detects that you are surfing via your Apple iPhone and shows you the Beta version of the iPhone compatible version and streams shows at 516Kbps (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) rather than the standard flash version which you would get if you access the iPlayer website via a PC or mac.

From here, you have access on your iPhone to the last 7 days of TV programming to watch at your leisure such as Eastenders, The Apprentice, Dragons Den, Dr Who and much much more. Playback quality is excellent and the load times are just as impressive. It only took a few seconds via our 8MB WiFi connection to start playback of a 30 minute episode of Eastenders the first time I tried it and even after over a month of usage, I have still not encountered a significant waiting time while it buffers (YouTube may want to learn something from these guys!)

The iPlayer is still however in Beta and some of the shows take a good few hours after they have been broadcast to find their way onto the iPhone version of iPlayer even though they are available on the normal iPlayer quicker than that. All in all, its definately something that deserves a shortcut from your home screen. To do this, just click the + button on the bottom of your Safari screen and choose ‘Add to Home Screen’ and voila - You now have a nice glossy iPlayer icon on your home screen ready for the next time you miss Eastenders!