Pseudo

It's always seemed a bit odd that you can restart a BBC programme via iPlayer while it's still being transmitted, but the moment it finishes, you have to wait till it's 'posted' as available on demand. 

Now they've done some tinkering, and promise that those shows you've 'just missed', will be available within minutes of the broadcast ending. They've dubbed the new system 'Pseudo Video On Demand". 

Product manager Henry Webster (MA in General Humanities, Edinburgh) says “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.”

Improvements have also been made to reduce the latency of live video, the lag time between the broadcast of live content, and the time it takes to reach the viewer.  Viewers on iPlayer will still, however, be about a minute behind, rather than the current 1 minute 20 seconds.