BBC Announces New iMP Trial

18th May 2005

The BBC have announced a new trial for their interactive media player (iMP), which allows people to download TV and radio shows for up to 7 days after they've been transmitted, much like the BBC's Radio Player.

The iMP uses peer-to-peer technology whereby users download the shows they request from other users, which saves the BBC from using a huge amount of bandwidth if they alone distributed the content from their own servers.

The iMP is apparently going to use 128 kbps WMA9 (Windows Media Audio 9) to encode the stereo radio shows, which means that the audio quality of the shows on the iMP should be better than the audio quality of the live broadcasts via all of the digital platforms, because 128 kbps WMA9 performs better than 192 kbps MP2 which Radios 1-4 use on the digital TV platforms, and performs far better than 128 kbps MP2 which the BBC use on DAB.

The BBC are looking for 5,000 broadband users to trial the iMP from September, and people interested should send an email to imptrial@bbc.co.uk, including their name, contact details, age and postcode.