BBC I-Player Time Ending Soonest

May 17, 2010 7:42 PM

I want to see what BBC I-Player programs will be unavailable to watch the soonest.

Currently the page is sorted by the date the program is posted. Their agreements make them unavailable at some point in the future, it's not a repository in perpetuity. In fact, only a select number of programmes (sic) have options to "catch up" where you can see all back episodes from a series. This has the listings for all shows available tagged with the "factual" tag, but unfortunately although I can find the region of shows from 7 days ago and will likewise be aging soonest page there may be things held for longer that I am unaware of being able to watch. Here is sort of a landing page for all stations with various tags which I was grateful enough to find, but you'd think like Ebay, "ending soonest" would be a priority place to start.

posted by oggusfoo to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I don't see a way to do that in the iplayer BBC pages themselves, so you might have to use a third party application: e.g. get_iplayer, via --sort expiry. Unfortunately get_iplayer was dropped by its original maintainer in response to the BBC implementing some Flash shenanigans that prevents "non-authorised" clients getting access. Being open source, it's still around - for example in the get-iplayer package in Ubuntu 10.04, or in this fork.
posted by Electric Dragon at 10:33 AM on May 18, 2010