Photo courtesy of Marco Bernardini on Flickr

The public (and press) are too quick to criticise the BBC for the licence fee. I’ve said before that I think we get fantastic return on investment for our £150 a year – with top quality radio, TV and Internet content.

This week though, I got another pleasant surprise from the BBC. Despite having a two year old flat screen TV without the latest Internet-apps capability, I pressed the red button whilst watching one of the BBC channels because I saw ‘iPlayer’ on the red button prompt.

And there it was – iPlayer. On my TV.

So I browsed around and started watching something from iPlayer on the TV. Completely on demand, with pass and play functionality – everything you get from the website equivalent.

The impressive-ness of the experience was that iPlayer was streaming content over the Internet on to my TV without me realising that the TV could do it!

Quality is OK – although Mrs H didn’t find it a problem, I could see that the bandwidth needs to be increased to give a TV-quality experience.

So a round of applause to the BBC for once again delivering something beyond expectation. A special commendation should go to Panasonic of course for also delivering beyond expectation! And both for doing it without increasing the cost.