13 March 2008
The BBC has stopped people from downloading programmes from the iPlayer website via a loophole that allowed were intended for streaming on an iPhone or iPod only.
Hackers had discovered that they were able to save the programmes to hard disk and share them with others.
Rights issues mean the BBC is only able to offer streamed programmes for up to seven days after broadcast.
A download service for PC users lets viewers keep the programmes for up to 30 days on their PC.
The Digital Rights Management on downloadable programmes from iPlayer was exploited and breached some time ago.
The BBC admitted that it was most likely facing a big challenge with hackers intent on circumventing copy protection. The corporation said in a statement:
It's an ongoing, constant process and one which we will continue to monitor. Like other broadcasters, the security of rights-protected content online is an issue we take very seriously.
The BBC announced a version of the iPlayer for iPhone and iPod touch owners last week.
The content for the phones and iPod is streamed as an MP4 file without copy protection and hackers quickly realised that they could access the file using a simple plug in for Firefox.
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