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Almost 10 years on from its original launch, Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer is the most popular online TV service in the UK, not just in terms of usage (see p.59 of ) but also in terms of positive word of mouth (see ). It’s available on over 10,000 different devices and has been downloaded 40 million times from mobile app stores. However, there’s always room for improvement and we’ve been working hard to make your experience of Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer even better. Dan Taylor-Watt, Head of Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer, gives a quick round-up of some of the latest enhancements.

Live Restart on mobile and tablet

First in time for the London 2012 Olympics, Live Restart has proved to be a hugely popular feature, ensuring viewers need never miss the start of a Â鶹ԼÅÄ programme again. Last summer , I am delighted to announce that we’ll shortly be rolling the feature out to our Android and iOS mobile and tablet apps. Our most recent app update introduced the ability to pause and rewind live TV and you’ll soon be able jump back to the start of a programme on your mobile or tablet with a single tap.

We’ve also recently made it easier to access Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer’s Live Restart feature on connected TVs by adding access from the home screen. Red Button+ is available on a wide range of connected TV sets and via YouView and Virgin TiVo.

Live events

The summer is typically a quieter time of year for Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer. Not this year. Live coverage of Glastonbury, Wimbledon, The Euros and The Olympics helped Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer reach an average of 16 million unique browsers a week in June, July & August – up 37% on the same period last year. And this wasn’t just viewing of our broadcast channels on different devices – in May of this year we began streaming on iPlayer, enabling us to show live performances from six stages at Glastonbury and up to 24 live simultaneous streams from the Rio Olympics. The below chart, compiled from data, shows the scale of live viewing in iPlayer over the summer months. In the week ending the 14th August, live accounted for 46% of total iPlayer viewing time.

HD by default

We want to deliver the best quality viewing experience we can based on the capabilities of the device you’re using to access iPlayer and the speed of your internet connection. Consequently, we’re making HD (720p 50fps) the default for on demand playback on computers and connected TVs which support Adaptive Bitrate (ABR), which enables the video quality to be automatically adjusted in response to how much bandwidth you have available at any given moment. Users with TV devices which don’t support ABR can still opt-in to HD via the button in the player. We’ve also recently made Â鶹ԼÅÄ One HD available to watch live on computers and connected TVs (it’s the default on connected TVs which support ABR and can be accessed on computers by selecting England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland from the ‘Change location’ menu in the footer of the iPlayer website).

For users whose broadband isn’t up to HD streaming, don’t forget your can download programmes in higher quality to watch offline, either on your or your .

Visual seeking

Whilst Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer already takes care of remembering how far through a programme you are, automatically picking up where you left off, there are those occasions when you need to search for a particular moment within a programme. We’re just about to make that a whole heap easier with the introduction of visual seeking. Hover over the scrub bar and you’ll see images from the programme appear as thumbnails, enabling you to jump straight to the moment you’re looking for. And if you want to share a link to a specific moment, you can add #t=XXmXXs to the end of the URL (replacing XX with the number of minutes and seconds - e.g. ). Available very soon on the iPlayer website, we’re looking to roll visual seeking out to the iPlayer TV and mobile apps in the coming year.

Also in development

There are lots more enhancements to Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer in the pipeline including the roll out of subtitles on our live channels (already available on computers as a ), an archive category, enabling easier, cross-platform discovery of the 400+ archive programmes now available on Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer (thanks to ) and a raft of personalisation features to make it even easier for you to discover and enjoy great Â鶹ԼÅÄ TV.

We’re also continuously working with manufacturers to improve the performance of iPlayer on their devices. For example, we’re currently working closely with Google on improving the Google Cast experience in iPlayer, before rolling out the feature to the , which launched in April and has already been downloaded over half a million times.

That’s all for now. Comments welcome below although individual technical queries are best directed to (if you haven’t been able to find an answer to your question on the ).