Well it looks as though the BBC iPlayer is turning out to be the biggest of damp squibs. I have previously looked forward to the iPlayer on this blog, while at the same time being exasperated by the bureaucracy that seemed to surround it.

A couple of months back, this report appeared in The Guardian and it sounded like it was almost time to give up on waiting for the iPlayer to arrive.

The first announcement of a groundbreaking download service for the BBC came four years ago. Back then it was called the Interactive Media Player, and was one of a number of ambitious projects to push the BBC into the future.

Since then iPlayer has been officially announced at least three times, rebranded twice, trialled several times and seen more than £3m invested in its development. Even then, it was only two weeks ago that the BBC Trust officially sanctioned it.

At last, iPlayer was unveiled to the public this week. I visited the website to register my interest — only to find that I couldn’t. Seemingly, my computer is too new for iPlayer.

To add insult to injury, even if you are not committing the heinous crime of using Vista rather than XP, iPlayer forces you to use Internet Exploder! For many, this is like being asked to insert nails into your eyeballs.

Put it this way. If anyone else had the chutzpah to release software like this, it would have already received a death by flaming from bloggers and Diggers. Perhaps it already has.

I mean, just look at it. You can’t use it on a Mac. You can’t use it on Linux. You can’t even use it on the latest version of Windows. And even if you are lucky enough to be using the correct operating system, you have to be using the right browser.

Even then, this sort of thing happens. Reports of the iPlayer’s shakiness are widespread. Even The Guardian‘s tech boffins apparently found it difficult to get working.

As though to top it off, iPlayer uses discredited DRM-based software to lock the programmes off. That is just the icing on the cake. Even the music industry is starting to give up on DRM.

Let’s face it. iPlayer has been in development for three or four years. It is still in the situation where it dictates which operating systems and browsers you can use. And even then it’s still really flaky.

My guess is that if a service such as, say, Joost launched like this, it would have never recovered from all of the negative publicity. It makes me wonder how the BBC dropped the ball so badly. Their Radio Player is a similar idea but without the pictures, and it works really well (current “severe technical problems” aside). So how come iPlayer is such a botched job?