BBC iPlayer developed for Macs

The BBC has released a beta version of its desktop iPlayer service for Macs and Linux.

Though a streaming version of the service has been available to Mac and Linux users for nearly a year, the desktop software allows people to download and watch content within 30 days of its initial broadcast.

The BBC has blamed the delay in bringing the iPlayer to Mac and Linux users on Microsoft's Windows Media DRM, which protects the downloaded content but is not supported on the platforms.

That problem has now been overcome by adopting Adobe's Integrated Runtime, a cross-platform technology that the company only pulled out of beta for Linux yesterday.

A beta version of the player is available from the BBC's labs site.

It is compatible with Mac OSX, and Linux distros that utilise the RPM package manager, including Ubuntu 7.1 and higher, Fedora 8.1 and higher, and OpenSuse 10.3 and higher. The download also supports Windows XP and Vista.

The BBC expects the final version to be available in February 2009.