CXO Exclusive: John Linwood, Chief Technology officer at the BBC

How is the unmissable made unmissable?

The BBC iPlayer has been one of the most successful BBC innovations in recent years. Within three weeks of its official launch in December 2007, it had already streamed over 3.5 million programmes - well over the BBC's prediction of half a million in the first six months.

Today, it is one of the key weapons in the BBC's media arsenal, with millions each week using it to catch up on their favourite programmes. The media centre has been picked up by the likes of Virgin's Catch Up On Demand and the most recent update for Sony's PS3 even included an iPlayer function.

However, it hasn't been easy and this month, CXO meets the BBC's Chief Technology Officer, former Yahoo exec John Linwood, to find out what the man behind the iPlayer thinks the future of digital broadcasting will involve.

Digital market challenges

The iPlayer's popularity has put pressure on the BBC, forcing them to upgrade their IT infrastructure to support the huge amounts of additional data and demand on the system. This has drawn criticism from certain UK ISPs such as Tiscali, due to the additional bandwidth that the application will require. As such, several ISPs have asked the BBC to partially fund network upgrades, but the BBC have countered by saying that the iPlayer was driving broadband subscription.

"One of the challenges we share with many other suppliers on the internet is that our user demand on the systems changes. For instance, if we have a very popular show on iPlayer and we get a huge speak in demand," Linwood said.

"One example that is keeping me awake at night is the 2012 Olympics. We know that people will be accessing it from their PCs or their phones because it will be on in the daytime so the BBC is going to have to build up a huge amount of infrastructure to support that."

Demand isn't the only problem, cost is. As the BBC is a fixed earnings company, they are faced with the problem of increasing their online technology, but without increasing their budget.

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