The Beeb has been quick to experiment with the iPhone’s capability for web applications, with the first fruits being its BBC Podcasts site. It lets you browse the broadcaster’s radio podcasts by station, genre or title (an A-Z list). I wrote about it earlier this month, but have been having a play with it to see how it shapes up.
It’s well designed, with a clean and easily navigable interface mirroring the way the iPod feature works on the iPhone. Clicking through (that should be thumbing through, really) to the podcast gives you a paragraph of textual description of the overall podcast, as well as a description of each individual podcast, along with their duration.
But what’s good is the Play button, which lets you stream these podcasts directly to your iPhone over Wi-Fi using Quicktime streaming - which again, means the controls for pausing and controlling the volume work in exactly the same way as the iPod feature.
As I write this, a Daft Punk documentary is streaming to my iPhone, which took just a few seconds to cue up and start. As such, it’s a decent radio substitute, with the obvious caveat that I could just have a radio sitting on the shelf, or stream the podcast via my PC. But nevertheless, the service is simple and effective - and clearly a starting point for future growth.
The one downside - and this is something the BBC’s Radio Labs team has publicly blogged about - is the fact that when you’re NOT connected to a Wi-Fi network, you can’t stream the podcasts. It’s not the BBC’s fault, but it does make the site less useful - since the times I’d really want to listen to a podcast is when I’m sitting on a train or bus.
As such, it makes more sense to have the podcasts downloaded onto your iPhone, which you can do by subscribing to them in iTunes on your PC or Mac. The result? I can’t quite think why I’d use the iPhone site rather than that method. Maybe as more features are introduced, I’ll get a clearer idea, but for now the BBC Podcasts site for iPhone shows how music streaming to the iPhone could work, but isn’t actually that useful.
Previous iPhone Web Apps
No. 1: HarperCollins Browse Inside
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