After a long tussle over the BBC's iPlayer download service between the corporation's executives and grumpy non-Windows users - and plenty of articles about its extended, baffling development from us - the Beeb has finally started streaming TV content online through iPlayer.
It's a browser-based Flash player embedded on static web pages - pretty straightforward stuff. I've just had a quick browse around the site, and it looks like the same restrictions apply that are on downloads: you can only watch shows from the past week.
In fact, further investigation shows it's got even more restrictions. At the moment not everything that's available for download is also available for streaming - Doctor Who, for example, just gives the error message "Sorry, Doctor Who series 2 is not available to play here".
Because the episodes exist on static pages though, you can share the streaming page if you like (but still not, it appears, of shows more than a week old - hacking the URL to see shows from longer doesn't make them viewable in Flash).
It'll be interesting to see whether this will increase uptake of the entire iPlayer service, which sources say has only a few thousand regular users at the moment. And it vastly increases the prospects of somebody indexing the content and providing it in a more long-lasting format.
It's also worth nothing that a report on The Register just yesterday quoted a BBC spokeswoman as saying that streaming would launch within the next two weeks. Looks like they were hedging their bets.
