When was iplayer invented

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BBC Homepage. Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, said the deal with Virgin takes the iPlayer towards being a multi-platform offering.

He said: "We have always envisaged BBC iPlayer on a TV platform and in the living room and are delighted that by working with Virgin Media, this ambition has today been realised. In the last three months of 99m programmes were viewed. In contrast, iPlayer statistics show that around 42m programmes were viewed in the three months since its Christmas launch.

Highfield is moving to Kangaroo as chief executive. An engineer and business-school-trained management consultant, Highfield had run interactive services at Flextech, the pay-TV operator that is now part of Virgin Media. He understood that pushing the BBC online meant passing control from the bosses to the users. This was considered radical, almost heresy, to insiders used to a world where the only editorial viewpoint was the BBC's. He began modestly.

Projects included a celebrity stock exchange, Celebdaq, and h2g2, a Douglas Adams fansite that he brought out of liquidation in Yet his stock rose rapidly as his division expanded. In , the BBC finally bet the bank on Highfield. It announced that it was developing an interactive media player and that trials would be completed by December The BBC, it declared, would make its "content available to audiences when and where they want it".

The BBC would be on demand. The future that Highfield had promised seemed only a few steps away. But Highfield's style and his ambitions won him enemies. His decisions to bring inHis decisions to bring in Erik Huggers from Microsoft as his deputy in , and to use Microsoft's digital rights management DRM software, were among the touchpoints. Critics also asked what had happened to the Creative Archive, the BBC's much-publicised bid to open its past content to the public.

In , Tom Coates wrote on his blog, plasticbag. Entitled "Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield? The post was wildly popular within the BBC, allegedly passed around by senior executives with glee, and it generated ten pages of comments.

Off the record, some of his former colleagues today dismiss Highfield as a Paul Smith-suit-wearing, Ferrari-driving incompetent who got lucky and took credit for the success of others.

But he seems unruffled by the criticism. But Coates says the criticism had much wider causes. How much money did it take them? How many people? What were the arguments about? What else didn't get made? Those are the real issues. By the middle of , Highfield and his team had produced a beta version of the iPlayer, whose interface let only Windows users access programmes.

Rumoured to have cost in the double-digit millions of pounds, it wasn't yet ready - three years after being announced. A spokesperson for the consumer group Voice of the Listener and Viewer urged the BBC to give more time for the transition. This article is more than 2 years old.

Move is latest attempt to deal with changes in the way people consume television.