The BBC Executive has made a request to the BBC Trust to allow pre-booking of programmes through the BBC iPlayer. The functionality was one of a number of potential new features revealed to journalists during a press briefing in London last week.
When the BBC Trust passed the iPlayer as part of its Public Value Test it indicated the BBC could return at a later date with a formal proposal for bookmarking in its on demand services. Subsequently the term pre-booking has emerged as a common description for the functionality.
That the Executive has to return to the Trust at all is an indication of the bureaucracy now faced by the BBC in launching the smallest of new services. The functionality is already commonplace on other catch-up services such as 4oD, Sky Digital, through the Series Link and used for BBC shows, and on e-commerce sites like Amazon.
According to the Trust this pre-booking would allow a programme to be downloaded to the consumer at a time that suited them, the ISP, and the BBC. It is also possible that a programme might be downloaded to the consumer ahead of its linear transmission, but protected by digital rights management, so that they would be unable to view the programme until the broadcast had gone ahead.
