I apologise for not blogging for some time now. I have been rather busy with work and travelling (yes I should have blogged about that to). Anyway in that time I have ended up owning all 3 major games consoles an Xbox 360, Wii and now a PS3 60gig! You may be surprised that I could get hold of a 60gig PS3 seeing as they are as common as gold dust and cost more now from Amazon resellers than it did when it was originally launched! Well luckily enough I managed to pick up and unboxed, ex display (by the looks of the case) and very dusty second hand one from an Amazon reseller for around the 300 pounds mark. I know what most people are thinking why not just get a 40? Well I needed the backwards compatibility I don't want to have to have a PS2 and PS3 sitting in my very crowded media area under my TV. Anyway I digress..

The main reason for my article is to talk about the BBC iPlayer on the PS3. You can't use the iPlayer on the PS3 unless you go to the website http://www.ps3iplayer.com/ setup by a rather clever chap named Chris Warren. Now you would have thought the BBC would have incorporated the changes he has made into the main iPlayer website and from the sound of things he would be pretty keen to help them, but that doesn't appear to have happened. What also gets me is that over a few weeks the BBC seems to do something to their own site that stops the PS3iPlayer version from working. This suddenly got me thinking, the Wii got its version of the iPlayer by the BBC, however I remember a distant article when the BBC were quizzed over why they didn't do an Xbox or PS3 version of the iPlayer. Their response was quite interesting and I kind of got the feeling that Microsoft and Sony were telling the BBC to butt out of their platform. It seemed as though Sony were only interested in feeding content to users under their own special service branded in a certain way and no doubt costing the user a monthly subscription in the same way Microsoft are doing with their rather limited content service on the Xbox 360 at the moment. Sony's approach would make sense, and they obviously don't want the video delivery model they have in mind for the PS3 blown out of the water by the BBC who would affectively be providing the content for free. I think Microsoft are being pretty much the same with the Xbox, it's the one reason they don't want to launch a browser for the Xbox it would make other content distributors able to supply content to a platform Microsoft would rather be the sole provider of content for their consoles.

Basically you ended up buying a delivery platform akin to a having a Sky or Vigrin Media box in your living room the only difference is it was disguised as a games machines that could play DVD's or BluRay Discs. The problem is that Microsoft's Xbox service is dreadful (in my opinion) and Sony are just taking a very long time to launch their service which should be available next year now. Both Sony and Microsoft have the ability to cash in big time on offering their consoles as a delivery platform to content providers in the same way that Sky, Virgin Media, FreeView and Joost are delivery platforms, which would help them claw back some of the losses they made selling the consoles at such a low price.