imran*

Last week the BBC announced the launch of it’s iPlayer service for the Nintendo Wii, hot on the heels of iPhone and iPod touch support last month. It’s great to see the BBC supporting so many platforms just a couple of months after the launch of the service and addresses the irony of having iPlayer available for every platform other than TV itself!

However iPlayer on Wii is said to be slow and jerky when running fullscreen, so I got to thinking about how difficult it’d be to create a dedicated iPlayer set-top box…

An Apple TV hacked to run full OSX is about the same cost as a Wii and includes handy support for a remote control, mouse or keyboard…you won’t even need to trick your browser’s user agent string into spoofing an iPhone or a Wii as the video and page format doesn’t really vary.

Now if I had a £180 to spare, I’d give it a whirl…

UPDATE: Sadly, though Playstation 3 can play embedded Flash clips from YouTube, it
doesn’t seem to be able to cope with iPlayer (perhaps a later version
of Flash) and I haven’t figured how to hack the PS3 browser’s user
agent string.