Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new Director General, has signalled that the broadcaster will have to invest more in its iPlayer and BBC Sounds apps if they’re to attract and retain audiences.
While the BBC often depicts itself as offering ‘world leading’ digital services, iPlayer offers audiences a much more basic set of features than other paid-for streaming apps, including being limited to 2 channel stereo and offering poor content discovery.
The little 4K content The BBC does offer is limited to HLG, a more basic High Dynamic Range format than the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision offered by other apps with a comparable cost to the BBC’s Licence Fee.
Additionally, the BBC unnecessarily limits the viewing and listening experience for users on some platforms.
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At present the broadcaster lags behind direct rivals and other sizeable companies on a number of fronts.
For example, it took a decade to bring subtitles to the iPlayer app on the Apple TV set top box, a device which media regulator Ofcom says has at least 700,000 users across the UK, and still declines to offer either full HD or 4K on the device because Apple’s rules would require it to build a native app instead of simply deploying its usual web-based version.
This ‘one size fits all’ strategy means the iPlayer is often unable to harness native features of a user’s TV or streaming device, leading to a very generic and basic user experience.
Speaking to The Media Show, Brittin said the broadcaster’s spending on content had been “at the expense of its technology” and that, as a result, “iPlayer could be better”.
He stressed that he wasn’t criticising the teams responsible for the apps, who he said had “done their best job” but said the BBC would need to prioritise “improving” iPlayer.