Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian

I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.

Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.