Rather peeved. 'Er indoors has control of the TV so I'm trying to watch the Scrum V match online. The bbc.co.uk/sport stream says it has finished, and going on iPlayer only allows me England variations, so I'm getting Mastermind, even when clicking on BBC2 Wales' schedule.
Does anyone know where BBC 2 Wales Live is on iPlayer?
Aye that's the alternative commentary, the "Red Zone" with Rick O'Shea.... not too keen on that. I've found the Ulster version, that'll do for now. Not happy mind!
New iPlayer radio launched. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19869320 Unfortunately it's also resulted in a new radio page which in my opinion looks worse. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/ I just hope this is a temporary page to announce it's launch and that it'll revert back to the beta version soon.
Interesting to see the whole thing has been rechristened 'iPlayer Radio' instead of plain 'Radio'. The new radio homepage looks boring, but the new station homepages have now come out of beta and are much improved with lighter backgrounds and larger logos. The iPlayer Radio header also now appears on all the programme and schedule pages, as do the new backgrounds.
Last edited by Robert Williams on 8 October 2012 1:53pm
The whole Radio thing has just been a bit of a mess, in my opinion. They seem to have changed their mind about what they wanted several times over the last year or so, as reflected in the numerous different /radio homepages, and it seems like a very last minute decision to reintroduce the iPlayer brand when there was talk of radio adopting a completely different identity. I can understand why they did it, because iPlayer is a strong brand, but it doesn't seem like it was part of the long term strategy.
Add to that the redesign of the Radio 1 and 1Xtra pages, and some of the other stations IIRC, last year and it makes the whole thing lack cohesiveness I think.
The new /radio homepage, too, is a bit of a strange one in that it's just very bare. It doesn't seem to achieve the things that the previous beta homepage set out to do, which is inevitably a bit of a backward step.
Our new product landing page at www.bbc.co.uk/radio is a deliberately bold move to radical simplicity. We carefully researched the way people use our sites and determined that most visitors to /radio are very task-focused - in other words, they know what they want to achieve and just want the simplest way of achieving that.
Our new product landing page at www.bbc.co.uk/radio is a deliberately bold move to radical simplicity. We carefully researched the way people use our sites and determined that most visitors to /radio are very task-focused - in other words, they know what they want to achieve and just want the simplest way of achieving that.
Just seems odd to me that after developing and beta testing the previous design, it's all been scrapped and replaced by this very simple "bold" move.
Incidentally, I've just downloaded the app, and that is actually pretty impressive. There's just something that doesn't seem right about the online pages.
I've been a bit wary of the 'Untitled Music and Radio Product' as it's been until now, as it just seemed like a bit of an overly formatted website. But bringing it together as 'iPlayer Radio' helps define it a bit more, and building it around live listening is a nice idea.
Some positives: full width background images on the programme page! Much much improvement there and I'm glad they've done that. Really happy with that being back. The design of the homepages for each stations look a bit nicer now too. Still not a fan of carousels being used that much but that's a personal thing, I prefer longer pages to the carousel.
Designing an experience around radio - and its own app - is a nice improvement too.
I'd like to see how they can integrate the Radio 1/1xtra live feed in to the product - because that feed is one of the cooler innovations they've done in a while, and could still work well with other music stations (2/6music) and would be good data to throw in to the mobile app.
Funny to read all the blog comments from Android fans getting het up as its only coming 'soon'. By the sounds of things both Android and iOS were being created at the same time but Android was just being much more difficult.
The existing iPhone app was getting buggier with each update (mainly crashing when restarting or forwarding through shows) so I've got my fingers crossed for this dedicated one. The wheel works well - I remember seeing that style on a UI site last year.
Still no rewind/FF/+5mins options, making it very difficult to jump to a particular point with your finger. And with the landscape view disappearing in favour of an EPG the bar is now very small.
The minimalist Radio page is bizarre considering the effort into the beta version, as is annoying your users by not copying their existing favourites across!