BBC closing Global iPlayer in June
BBC confirms iOS-friendly app will close next month.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Streaming
The BBC has confirmed the “global” version of its iPlayer on-demand service will close next month.
The corporation had charged users subscription fees to watch programmes via the app in Western Europe, Australia and Canada.
Reports suggest US pay-TV operators had threatened to drop the BBC America channel if the app had launched locally because they believed it would cost them viewers.
BBC Worldwide previously announced it intended to pull support for the Global iPlayer app, but now confirms the shutdown date.
“As announced in July 2014, the service will be closing this year as planned,” said a spokeswoman.
“The service will close on 26 June.”
The global iPlayer app was first made available as an iOS app in July 2011 with titles including Gavin and Stacey, Fawlty Towers, Planet Earth and “classic” episodes of Doctor Who, but but was never extended beyond Apple’s platform.
Users have been advised, “We would like to thank all of our subscribers for using the service. We are now developing plans to launch new digital services across multiple devices.”
3 Responses
I used it for a while and the UI was good. You could also download programmes to your ipad, which was great for when you didn’t have internet access. The problem was, the content was quite old. They also changed the pricing. I didn’t renew when they did that.
Still this is a backward step and might lead to more people going back to Bittorrent services.
Doesn’t surprise me. As far as I can see it’s a second rate version of its UK based version which can be accessed by anyone with a proxy account so why wouldn’t you go for the real thing instead? I would have been perfectly prepared to pay the licence fee for overseas access to iplayer. The failure to offer this is a real own goal by the BBC.