Following a deal by the BBC and Virgin Media it appears the BBC iPlayer will be coming to UK TVs, effective Monday.
All of Virgin Media’s 3.5 million customers will now be able to watch BBC programming they have missed by simply hitting the red button on any BBC channel. All customers will get access to the BBC iPlayer as well using Virgin Media’s EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) menu but the menu wont be updated until the summer.
Malcolm Wall, CEO of Content at Virgin Media added: “We’re delighted to be the first TV platform in the UK to offer our customers BBC iPlayer as part of our on-demand service. The enormous success of iPlayer online has demonstrated the desire TV viewers have for viewing quality programmes at a time that suits them, and now it’s available from the comfort of the living room”.
The iPlayer has been very successful since its launch late last year and the BBC has even said that there have been 42 million downloads in the first 4 months of the year.
A Sky spokesperson, a rival broadcaster to Virgin, had this to say:
“We’d expect that the BBC will make available its publicly funded content to all platforms. In the meantime, Sky+ is the biggest on-demand service, now used by 12 million people in 3.4 million homes. Almost three-quarters of enabled customers have used Sky Anytime since launch, watching a total of 32 million programmes to date.”
Result for: months of the year
According to the research firm Gartner, sales of smartphones doubled in North America for the Q1 2008, a huge growth even in comparison to the category’s growth world wide.
The growth was spurred by growing popularity for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry line and the Apple iPhone.
Apple sold 1.73 million iPhones for the first three months of the year, enough to move into a 5.3 percent share of the worldwide smart-phone market. That number should be much larger soon, thanks to the launch of the new 3G version of the phone and deals Apple has struck to bring the phone to every continent.
Overall, smartphone sales in North America were 7.3 million units, up a massive 106 percent year on year. RIM continued to dominate the category, with a U.S. market share of 42 percent.
“Despite economic concerns, the smart-phone market continued to expand in the United States, driven by heavy advertising and strong marketing promotions as more devices reached mass-market price points,” said Gartner analyst Hugues De La Vergne.
Global smartphone sales increased 29 percent to 32.2 million but saw most of that jump thanks to the North American surge.
