Sources at the BBC have finally confirmed the long awaited arrival of iPlayer on Xbox One. It’s taken almost a year for the streaming service to arrive on Microsoft’s Xbox One, with the rival Playstation 4 featuring the app from launch. Microsoft have been late to the party with some features, but in other areas have been overtaking Sony in terms of content and available apps.
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The BBC announced the inclusion of the iPlayer app on Xbox One with little fanfare in the last few days, with the app’s long-awaited inclusion seemingly on the horizon, or at least, before Christmas… we hope.
“I am happy to announce that we’re aiming to launch new BBC iPlayer on Xbox One by the end of this year,” said iPlayer’s executive project manager Marcus Parnwell in a Q and A on the BBC iPlayer blog.
The blog post also highlighted the whole range of devices the iPlayer app can now call home, which is basically a long list of tv’s, blu ray players and other set top boxes which now support the app, which even includes discount TV sets from reliable makers such as Celsus.
Microsoft has been working hard to compete with the Playstation 4 lately, announcing new colours, new apps, and various other features to match and rival Sony’s top-selling console. They’ve even recently made ‘underdog’ themed adverts featuring Rocky Balboa quotes to promote their fight back against Sony.
Meanwhile, the BBC says they’re well on the way to bringing the sleek new interface for iPlayer that has just landed on mobile devices to all of their supported devices across the tech spectrum (techtrum?).
The broadcasting corporation made it clear that they would be bringing the interface update to YouView, Virgin Media and BT set top boxes later this year.
Parnwell added: “Whilst I cannot announce dates, we are targeting this year for these platforms. Similarly, other devices on our legacy version of BBC iPlayer will be migrated to the new version this year as well.”
Source: BBC iPlayer blog