BBC iPlayer available for Mac in 2008

There’s definitely been some “finally” moments this week. First there was the announcement of the long (and boy do we mean LONG) anticipated Duke Nukem 3D sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, and now the Beeb has announced that it’s iPlayer will come to Macs in 2008.

When the BBC first announced the iPlayer, MacBookers were none to pleased about the fact that it was to only be available for Windows users.

The Beeb defended itself and basically said it wanted to launch the iPlayer as soon as it possibly could and the best way to pull off "making the service available in the shortest time frame to the greatest amount of users” was to release a Windows compatible version and then develop other versions later on.

Well perhaps the BBC was right. We all remember the astonishing numbers associated with the iPlayer over the seasonal period. Yes, over Christmas (and on Christmas day in particular) we were quite the busy little bees when it came to streaming or downloading shows from the BBC iPlayer. During the festive fun, over 1 million users watched more than 3.5 million shows.

The BBC said nearly half of all programmes streamed or downloaded were placed outside the top 50 most popular shows. Fancy that.

BBC corporation’s director general Mark Thompson was quoted as saying.

"I hope this good news is evidence of the hard work that the BBC is committing to supporting other platforms"

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will be available until the end of 2008.