Personalised iPlayer 'key future goal'

Tomorrow's beta launch of a new version of iPlayer is a "key milestone" on the way to a fully personalised service, the BBC has announced.

Erik Huggers, group controller of BBC future media and technology, said that the new version "sets us up for a world where this becomes a much more personalised service".

The first tentative step towards an iPlayer tailored to each user is the appearance of a "last played" feature, which tracks the programmes watched by a user and thus enable them to stop a programme and subsequently resume watching it.

In this iteration of iPlayer, the personalisation feature is purely cookies-based; however, it was revealed this morning that future versions will use the BBC-wide registration system to allow people to build content libraries of their favourite programmes and roam their profiles among all the computers they use. Such personalisation features are currently in the research and development phase, but Anthony Rose, head of BBC digital media technologies, speculated that the registration system would at some point in the future allow users to book programme downloads to a particular computer using their mobile phone.