BBC iPlayer downloads now work on five more Android devices, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, S3 Mini and Tab 2 10-inch as well as the Amazon Kindle and its HD equivalent.
The updated BBC TV catch up service is available to download on Google Play now and will be headed to the Amazon Appstore over the next few days.
Downloaded programmes will automatically expire after 30 days and the new version of the app (2.0.1) also includes some minor stability improvements.
Read Recombu Digital’s guide to BBC iPlayerBBC iPlayer for Android added the ability for users to download programmes for offline viewing last month. Though the majority of phones and tablets could make use of the new feature, there were a few devices, cheifly, the Kindle Fire tablets, that couldn’t make use of the feature.
On top of this, David Berlin, who leads development for BBC iPlayer has spoken about challenges faced when increasing availability of the service for Android devices.
“We have found that some brand new high powered popular devices can only receive streams to a certain level, or that video downloads bugs can cause cyclical crashes and device hard resets, rendering the BBC iPlayer app useless thereafter and the device temporarily paralyzed.”
Because of this, the BBC has decided that from now on it will name phones and tablets that it knows iPlayer will run on smoothly.
The BBC is working hard to increase the number of Android devices iPlayer works on. Back in July, Berlin revealed that the BBC’s Android development team for iPlayer was three times the size of the iOS development team.
In an attempt to ensure that popular devices can access iPlayer from launch, the BBC will be working more closely with manufacturers.
As well as meaning that hero devices can download episodes of Strictly out of the box, the process should help the BBC fix bugs on current devices. The BBC hopes to enable high quality streaming and downloads on affected devices without the need to post updated Apps on Google and Amazon’s respective app stores.
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