Ashley Highfiled, head of BBC future media and technology, told a MIP audience he wants to see the iPlayer available on cable and wants compatibility with iTunes and Macs.

"Although Apple’s proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches, it is one of our top priorities to re-engineer our proposed BBC iPlayer service to work on Macs," he said. He added that the trial of the interactive media player had demonstrated that the service could account for as much as 10% of BBC TV viewing in broadband homes. "With this level of nascent demand, we want to make BBC iPlayer as widely available as possible, across as many platforms as is feasible. We're starting with the biggest available audience: the 22 million people who are broadband connected in Britain. The next biggest audience is three million cable homes. After that, it's Macs, media centres, and smart handheld devices."