The BBC has made some ‘under the hood’ changes to the BBC iPlayer that will improve the speed at which new programmes are made available, and help reduce the delay on live broadcasts between iPlayer and other platforms like Freeview and Sky.

Henry Webster, the BBC’s Head of Product, Media Services, said that some ‘under the hood’ changes to the BBC iPlayer has speeded up the availability of programmes on the service. They have cut the time between a programme ending on live TV and becoming available on the iPlayer. Previously, if viewers missed the end of a show they would have had to wait for a considerable period of time for the on demand version to become available. Now, those shows will be available much faster, within a matter of a few minutes of the show ending.

Henry Webster said that “Rather than processing the whole programme once it’s finished, this pseudo VOD system reuses the live segments of video you see when you’re watching live on iPlayer to create a temporary on demand video instead, which we can publish as soon as the programme ends. This plugs the gap, while we work on processing the high quality on demand video as we did before, and once this is ready replace the temporary video.”

This means that the temporary copy of the programme from the live stream won’t be available in high quality. Once the high quality on-demand copy is processed, it will automatically replace the lower quality temporary file on the iPlayer.

Webster also explained that until now, “viewers watching live streams may have found they were lagging about 80 – 120 seconds behind the TV broadcast. This lag is built in to all live-streamed video on all streamers, to ensure viewers aren’t interrupted when they’re watching a live stream.”

This lag has meant that viewers watching live programming on the BBC via Freeview, Freesat or Sky, might see actions, like a goal, up to two minutes before someone watching through the iPlayer.

Webster confirmed that “thanks to some upgrades we’ve made, we’ve been able to reduce this lag by 20 seconds, meaning viewers will now typically only be around 60 seconds behind the TV broadcast.”