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BBC iPlayer now lets you pause and resume shows on different devices
BBC iPlayer lets you watch TV shows on almost any device, but until now all of the different apps have felt like pretty siloed experiences. Well, that's soon going to change. An update rolling out this week is adding support for "cross-device resume," which, as the name suggests, lets you drop one device and pick up from where you left off on another. As long as you're signed in with a BBC ID, iPlayer will do the rest and automatically cue up your episodes on other devices. It'll be available on desktop, tablets and smartphones initially, but the BBC says it'll eventually come to set-top boxes and other TV hardware too.
BBC 'Live Restart' brings pause, rewind and 'start from beginning' to iPlayer live streams
On demand TV is great and all, but what if the program you're wanting is on right now? Previously -- in the UK at least -- you'd have to either catch the whole thing later, or accept you'd missed a bit, and watch the rest live. Starting today, however, iPlayer will let you rewind, pause, and even start live shows from the beginning. In fact with the "Live Restart" update, you'll be able to go back over the last two hours of scheduled TV, should you wish. The new features come as a result of the BBC switching to "HTTP chunked" streaming instead of RTMP, which breaks up the H.264 video feed into blocks, delivering them like regular web packets -- apparently improving scalability, adaptive bitrate playback and cost effectiveness, compared to Content Delivery Networks. All we want to know is will you be able to skip the ads? Oh wait.
