The hacker that managed to port the BBC’s iPlayer onto the PS3 console has been unofficially offered a job by the BBC’s Head of Digital Media Technology, Future Media & Technology.

Anthony Rose, who was speaking about what the BBC was hoping to do with iPlayer on the PS3 and other consoles, jokingly [but maybe for real] offered the hacker a job on his BBC blog:

“By the way, if the person who created the ps3iplayer port is looking for a job at the BBC, (s)he’s welcome to contact me ;-)”

The ps3iplayer port, according to said hacker, took less than day to create and allows PS3 users to access iPlayer by fooling the BBC servers into thinking your PS3 is a Wii - which the BBC has just started supporting. The hacker wrote on his site:

“It’s mainly a demonstration of how easily the BBC could support the PS3 with their Wii version. This does nothing more than mask your PS3’s user-agent string and makes half a dozen changes to make the JavaScript and CSS function correctly on the PS3. It only took a day to produce, so come on BBC - how about implementing this properly?”

Rose said:

“I was interested to read that someone has managed to make BBC iPlayer work on the PS3 by pretending that it’s a Wii. As you know, our aim is to make BBC iPlayer available on a broad range of devices. We’d love to be on every popular device tomorrow, including the PS3, and it was on our roadmap. However, the reality is that we only have finite developer resources, and we need to divide our development time between expanding the platforms iPlayer is available on versus all the other cool things that we’re working on (better video quality, personalisation, new site features, etc).”

So, give that hacker a job then and let’s speed things up.-Martin Lynch

TV BBC iplayer PS3

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