BBC iPlayer - Extended Availability Consultation

Working fine on laptop

The redesign for 12 month availability is underway with a launch in 2020 penciled in.

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2019/10/07/bbc-announces-iplayer-revamp-to-launch-in-2020/

BBC iPlayer NEW for 2020, In addition to Seven Worlds, One Planet, now Dracula has appeared in UHD.

I've been giving 'Robin Hood' and 'Merlin' a run out now they're available for this twelve months. The HD upscale on both, if it is upscaled and not acquired HD from somewhere, which I really doubt, is astonishingly good. Some work has gone into the release of both series. I do realise that the final Merlin series is native HD btw.

I always thought Robin Hood was shot in native HD as it wasn't as VFX heavy compared to Doctor Who and Merlin. Bleak House IIRC was one of the first BBC drama to shoot in HD.

Wikipedia suggests Robin Hood was shot at 720p. The first series was one of BBC’s first HD releases on home media - so early that it was one of the eight to get a HD-DVD as well as Blu-ray.

Merlin got all of it’s series released on BD stateside. They’ve only recently started to upscale SD content on the format (Doctor Who, Hitchhikers, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers), so we can be fairy confident that Merlin is at least 720p too.

Robin Hood was also one of the first drama series shown on the as-was-then BBC HD trial channel..

I'd be surprised if it was 720 for the sole reason that Life on Mars was also filmed in 720 but not shown on the channel because it was not 1080.

Apologies if the passage of 14 years of time since then means that any part of this post is not true.

Wasn't Life On Mars shot on super 16? You can certainly see film cameras on the special features on the DVDs.

If it was ......
that does not meet the BBC delivery requirements for HD ..
Which is why Spooks also shot super 16 was not recommissioned ,

Surely that's not why it was recommissioned, unless the production refused to move to a different format?

Yes - you are right - thanks for correcting me.

Thanks for the debate this has thrown up and for the corrections made.