Xbox One owners who have been hoping to receive BBC’s iPlayer app on their device would soon see their hopes materialize as the broadcaster has announced that the app will be out for the platform later this year.
iPlayer Executive Project Manager Marcus Parnwell announced on the company’s official blog that the iPlayer app will be launched on Xbox One by the end of this year.
He also has said that several other hardware platforms paired with YouView boxes will also receive the app soon and that BBC is working with BT, YouView and Virgin Media to bring the app to other platforms. The post also announces that the platforms which already have the app will be updated with the new version before the end of 2014.
The post lists out the devices that will get the updated version this year, including TVs, Blu-Ray players and set-top boxes. It notes that about 1,200 devices support the app and that’s why it takes a lot of time to send out updates to the iPlayer app on all devices.
Another major announcement is that the Bigscreen version of the app will be unplugged as only 0.1 percent of subscribers use this version. As the company only has limited resources supporting the Bigscreen version and almost 85 percent of users are using the latest version of iPlayer app, support for the Bigscreen version will be stopped from September 2014. However, the other version running on MHEG technology will still continue to run as usual.
Since its launch in May, the iPlayer app has received about 4 updates with several bug fixes and performance improvement tweaks.