Back in May 2010, the BBC announced that they would begin to plan linking to other on-demand sites on the internet such as ITV player, Five on demand and Channel 4’s service. Nine months later and the scheme has just taken off, with iPlayer showing content of these sites as well as S4C and SeeSaw.com.
The content itself doesn’t play within iPlayer, it links to the external service through its menu, allowing you to search for all your favourite TV shows through iPlayer and keeping traffic within the other sites. The BBC do a similar service for Newspapers, often linking to their content in their news stories.
The move to link these online content sounds very similar to the set-top box project, YouView, also headed by the BBC. YouView aims to give people the chance to link their TV’s, through a set-top box to their broadband connection, giving them access to various different on-demand services without having to watch them on their PC.