The BBC iPlayer relaunched at the end of last year, with the British Broadcasting Corporation trying to iron out some of the bugs, and make the service available for all.

After 20 days out of beta, the BBC announced that the iPlayer has racked up 1 million viewers, and more than 3.5 million programmes have been viewed using the television on demand service.

That’s an average of over 250,000 programmes either streamed or downloaded every day since the Christmas Day launch. Quite impressive for a UK based operation showing just BBC programmes.

YouTube has had a well intentioned upload limitation of 100 megabytes, or 10 minutes, for a long time now. Mainly in an effort to stop copyright infringement.

This of course means that anyone wishing to put a copyrighted TV episode on the site has to break it up in to small pieces, which is annoying, and does indeed prevent it happening too often.

10 Minute Limit Lifted For Some

While the 100mb limit is still in place, and not going anywhere, YouTube have now allowed trusted uploaders and YouTube partners to exceed the 10 minute limit, something which Charles Trippy has done by a long way.

Trippy, the man behind Viral Video Fever, decided to push the new allowance to its limit, by uploading a video which runs for over nine hours. And here it is in all of its glory:

With the writers strike still in almost full effect, people are starting to wonder whether it’s actively affected people’s viewing habits.

Two pieces of reliable data are now pointing very clearly to the fact that it has, and that online video has increased its market share since the strike started.

Traffic To Video Sites Has Doubled

Number one: According to the BBC, Nielsen says that traffic to some online video sites has doubled since the Hollywood writers’ strike in October turned the TV into a wasteland of reruns and unfunny late-night talk shows (although it may be stretching things to call the Nielsen figure a data point, since I can’t find a report that has those numbers in it).

Number two: A report from the Pew Internet Research project, a reliable and independent research group, indicates that almost 50 per cent of those surveyed had been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube (up from 38 per cent last year) and daily traffic to such sites has doubled in the past year. The number of people who said they had been to such a site within a day of being asked almost doubled to 15 per cent.

This past week has seen the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happening in Las Vegas. 

At this trade show, most of the broadband television companies have had some sort of presence, and a lot of them have made announcements concerning their future plans.

Here, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge talks about his trip to the convention, and his views on NBC Universal pulling out of iTunes:

NBC Universal shows up at CES 2008 and online, but not on my iPod

So, the trip out to Vegas was a long one. Sherwin and I had a stop in Little Rock, Arkansas along the way. The total time was of the trip was about seven hours. 

Knowing this, I had planned to catch up on the second season of Heroes and was going to download it all to my iPhone the night before the trip.

That’s when it sunk-in that NBC Universal pulled out of the iTunes Store. NBC offers their content via Hulu and NBC’s own site but both are just a stream – you can’t download or time shift shows to your Mac or PC, let alone your iPod or iPhone. So, I instead of watching new shows (well, at least new to me), I watched older shows I had already downloaded.

Fancast has been in beta testing for the last six months, but at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the site officially went live, and brought Comcast in to the world of IPTV in to the bargain.

We reviewed the early development of Fancast back in August, here on Web TV Wire, and were impressed by its comprehensive database of TV programmes, and movies. So what has changed since then?

Fancast now features full episodes of many mainstream, and some not so mainstream TV shows, as well as the already abundant resources it had for browsing TV listings and movie offerings.

Two well-known corporate entities have this week delivered an official press release, making them the first big alliance to be formed in 2008.

Netflix and LG have teamed up together to form a sort of digital download alliance.

The arrangement the two partners in cinematic deliverance (don’t it just roll off the tongue?) have made is fairly straightforward. 

Netflix intends to handle the virtual storefront and download software (and likely the majority of the marketing effort, too), while LG does its magic manufacturing hardware in the form of set-top boxes.