BBC iPlayer launches on Chromecast

The BBC iPlayer has launched on Chromecast, the Google smart TV dongle that launched in multiple countries in Europe today. 

The BBC has added support for Chromecast to both the Android and iOS versions of iPlayer.

Chris Yanda, executive product manager, mobile platforms, BBC Future Media, said in a blog posting that the BBC would also shortly add support for the Chrome web browser on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS desktop and laptop computers for the new web version of iPlayer.

Yanda said that having Chromecast manage the video streams playing on the television would have the benefit of enabling the BBC to provide bitrates and video profiles that are more suitable for a big screen than a small screen.

The iPlayer app for Chromecast sends a message from a mobile device to the Chromecast dongle to tell it to request content direct from a BBC server and play it on the TV. The dongle then decodes and plays the video stream, with the mobile device acting a s a remote control rather than streaming the content to the dongle itself.