The BBC’s iPlayer is a truly wonderful thing, as I have mentioned before.
In general, the content is only available in the UK, in the same way that Hulu is only in the US, but it gives those of us who pay a BBC licence fee access to everything on the Beeb’s now numerous channels from the last week. And with the iPlayer Download options, you can download it to your machine and watch it for up to 30 days. This used to involve a Windows-only binary, but now you can click a link to be an iPlayer Labs tester and iPlayer items will automatically gain a ‘download’ option, which makes use of an Adobe Air-based application, meaning that it works on Macs and Linux too.
I’ve only just discovered this download facility, though. Before that, on our recent trip to Paris, I was surprised to discover that the free wifi in our little hotel was attached to rather a good internet connection. I logged into my home Linux machine and did a little magic which allowed me to persuade iPlayer that I was still in the UK, and we had some happy evenings watching very high quality content, including episodes we might otherwise have missed of the rather fun ghost story Crooked House.
Catch, or download, the omnibus edition while it’s still there…
As an aside, I’m interested to note that the vast majority of people visiting Status-Q are Mac users – over 80% – which is probably because I post quite a bit about Mac software, and partly, no doubt, because of the intelligence of the readership with which I am blessed 🙂 Of the Windows users, though, three-quarters are using Chrome, a few using Opera, a very few on Firefox, and Internet Explorer users are too few for any statistics to be significant. Interesting. It may indicate that more of you are reading at home than at work, perhaps…
RSS feed
I am never sure how far I trust stats about blog visitors these days… I hardly ever visit Status-Q, but follow via RSS via Google, and surely many other followers will have similar detached setups?
Will have to have a look at Crooked House 🙂
I’m sure that’s right, Laura; I was basing my stats on Google Analytics which won’t, of course, pick up anything read through a pure RSS reader. One of my most popular pages, on the other hand, is my port of wget to Mac OS X, which everybody would need to visit in order to click the link, and all of them will be Mac users.
It’s like I always say. There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and web statistics.
and how many of the Windows users are really Mac wanabees? 🙂
Isn’t Paris famous for its good (fibre-optic) connectivity?
what sort of statistic do you get when my reader (google reader in my case) is reading your RSS? I would imagine I don’t show up at all huh?