The concept for the BBC iPlayer was dreamt up by Ben Lavender in 2005, a BBC employee frustrated by attempting to BitTorrent Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He went on a 'road-show' around the BBC to sell the con… See more

The original iPlayer service was launched in October 2005, undergoing a five-month trial by five thousand broadband users until 28 February 2006. iPlayer was heavily criticised for the delay in its launch, rebranding … See more

Before September 2016, a television licence was not required to stream either BBC television or radio programmes from the iPlayer that had already been broadcast, though a licence was still required in order to watch liv… See more

One of the key features of the original iPlayer download service was the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to enable the distribution of large video files (i.e. TV programmes) to scale effectively. Once downloade… See more

On 27 May 2008, BT began to charge BT Vision customers £3 per month for watching BBC Replay, a cut-down version of the iPlayer offering a more limited 30 hours of BBC programming per week. A spokesma… See more