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Well we all knew that is was going to arrive but i’m sure that you were as surprised as me when the BBC announced they were releasing the first BBC desktop iPlayer beta version today, the same day that Adobe announced the release of AIR for Linux 1.5. It’s the first major Adobe AIR desktop application by the BBC that is set for general adoption by the TV viewing public here in the UK. Unfortunately for those outside the UK you won’t get the chance to test the BBC iPlayer AIR application.

Read the technology news item from the BBC.

There was some confusion when it launched with many people including myself installing and opening the application only to find it directing me straight back to the iPlayer website with not a download button insight. After some further investigation and some pointers from the likes of Andrew Shorten, we got it up and running. So here is what you have to do currently to the AIR app working.

Firstly go to the download page and download the AIR application using the installer badge. If you don’t see the installer badge make sure that you are using the latest Flash player 10. Next you will need to go to the iPlayer labs page and opt-in to become a beta tester for iPlayer just by selecting the button. Now you need to head on over to the iPlayer website to find some content that is ready for playing in the new iPlayer desktop AIR application. To help you on your way you can try this episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks (it will expire in around six days from the date of this post). In the bottom right hand corner you will see a download button, click that and it will fire up the iPlayer desktop AIR application and start the download of the programme to your local filesystem.

Phew, hopefully that helps you get set up. So on with the review.

Being a beta the functionality is very light at the moment it acts more like a download manager and player. Downloading BBC programme content is initiated by the link in the iPlayer website pages there is no way to browser the available catalogue from with iPlayer Desktop although i’m sure this is not far away.

The desktop experience in this release consists of a tabbed interface with three panes – downloads, now playing and settings. Starting with downloads this is where you locally stored content is shown including any that are currently downloading. There is no sorting in this view by name, type channel or date. You get a visual indicator showing how many days are left before the content expires and an option to show more programme information that scrolls into view. Extra information includes an programme overview, file size and written expiry date right down to the minute. Selecting a programme from within the download tab takes you over to the next tab, now playing.

The video player is a carbon copy of that from within the iPlayer website. Usual elements are present here like volume, fullscreen option a restart button and play / pause. The size of the video is larger than the standard streaming size on the iPlayer website and as a result I think the view looks more pixelated and jagged. This might just be down to the content encoding but I’m curious as to why it is not the same size.

The next tab settings allows you to set the location for saved content on your machine, if it is required to open upon startup and if you agree to sending user statistics back to the BBC. In a separate tab there are settings for parental guidance allowing you to password protect programme content that is for over 16’s with a password.

When offline there is a notification in the top right corner although it looks completely lost and as if it was thrown in as a after thought. Interestingly when offline the iPlayer logo is not clickable, usually this takes you direct to the iPlayer website.

Performance was really good on my machine playback was smooth (disregarding the pixelating content mentioned earlier), and used a fairly small amount of processing cycles on my 2.16 Ghz Mac.

So I’m really excited about this AIR development and where it is going to take the future of broadcasting. I can’t help feeling that the BBC released this is a rush to coincided with the 1.5 AIR release by Adobe for Linux. The help documentation was quite frankly useless and caused a lot of confusion on Twitter. So BBC listen up. When you launch a new application at least have quick outline on how to get up and running – step 1 do this etc. Don’t leave it up to the community to painfully work it out. Anyway I’m interested to see it’s evolution.

Here is my first and quick video review of the BBC iPlayer Desktop AIR application:

BBC iPlayer Desktop AIR application review from RefreshingApps on Vimeo.

Design eye

Design cues and branding are definitely iPlayer however I’m not sure what it is with the BBC and AIR applications. It seems that a different team work on the UX and design for the AIR applications it just doesn’t look polished even for a beta. I always look to the iPhone website for the iPlayer as I think that is a great example of design and content suitable for the intended device.

The download area appears a little lost with quite small typography. The time left blocked into day’s is nice but how about changing colour as it appears closer to being expired and the delete button and text looks lost. I would like to see the ability to sort my programmes by channel by clicking a channel logo. The extra information is nice but how about having that as a tooltip when you mouse over the content image for a few seconds or even a click tip?

The now playing screen looks and matches the standard player which is great for consistency. I like the opaque information panel with the channel logo that really works and is what users will expect from using devices like Freeview and Sky.

The settings tab needs a little work in my eyes. Flex has a great charting API so why not use it to give a dynamic representation of your drive space and how your much saved content takes up. Some form validation and tooltip would work nicely here.

Please sort out the offline indicator make it more prominent and design it so that it fits with the design better.

I’m a big fan of giving first time users an option to be guided through the main features or setup of an application. The BBC could do that here a quick tour of the iPlayer Desktop application.

I liked the toast like notifications that appear when your content has downloaded and hope that they add growl support for OS X users in the future.

I’m interested to see other’s opinion on this beta so far and I will add updates to this review as and when new features arrive.

Technical eye

This is built using the Adobe Flex 3 framework, the AIR runtime SDK and the new Flash Media Rights Management Server which allows for the local DRM’ing of content for use within AIR applications.