Apologies, you are most certainly correct.

Yep *hand up* that's us. We watch the current episode of the good Doctor once a week, and listen to the radio sometimes, but tbh if I had to buy a license I wouldn't even do that.

It's a ridiculous amount of money, and I can't see it being good value.

The £5.7m spent so far has obviously been money pretty well spent, up until the current beta which is crap and the only development appears to be social network crap.

I can't see what an additional £4.8m could bring to the service - there are no extra features required as far as I can see. I suspect it's a case of "ah -we've got some money left in the budget, I guess we'd better spend it"

I've got a number of friends who've got rid of their tellys and licenses because they can watch the odd thing they do like on iPlayer, etc.

Personally, I never use the iPlayer as I'm on sky broadband, so I don't have a fast enough download speed.

Well depends on what you call a useless radio station. I used to listen to Radio One, not any more, and never really listened to Radio 3, but each to their own. Plus others may only listen to one station but they benefit from the collective radio licence fee.

It depends on what you are doing. For a mult-national corporation, implementing the re-engineering of its supply chain and implementation of a new SAP version, it was money well spent. The outlay of over 24M over 2 years reaped around 10M in efficiency savings each month, so yes, it was good value for money.

The SAP implementation took a long time on its own, plus all the new / amended ABAPs.

And they weren't our biggest client! Others were pumping in much more into our company each month - the company didn't really look at any projects that were valued at less than 250K, they just weren't worth the time and effort in chasing down the leads!

We had the same again, in Frankfurt, where a large drug company was looking at its global financial reporting structure, they had over 70 consultants and contractors working on the project, all staying in hotels in Frankfurt (we got discounted rates of 110€ a night, plus flights to and from the UK every week.

These sorts of global projects make something like the iPlayer seem like pocket change!

Yeah, Dave we are actually talking about the BBC's iPlayer. I don't understand the relevance of a business re-engineering it's supply chain. Who in their right mind would say that investing in an efficient supply chain isn't money well spent?

I'm saying that the money (what is it, nearly £5m) that the BBC have put aside to develop iPlayer isn't, in my opinion, likely to offer good value for money.

I was just pointing out, in the scale of software projects, that the iPlayer isn't that expensive.

Compared to the tens or hundreds of millions invested in developing Flash or similar technologies, the iPlayer isn't very expensive - even the cost per potential user isn't that high.

It’s an experiment, and partly training the viewer for the future. Eventually, iPlayer will be the way we all watch TV, with live stuff being more for special events.

Let
Me
Fix
That
For
You

Mark

Let me fix that for you.

Although it can also mean 'let me fork that for you'. Don't think the Prof meant that version though.

Edit: Pesky speed-eggmeister.