Microsoft’s Senior Regional Director for Northern Europe, Neil Thompson, has confirmed that the company currently has no plans on bringing over the BBC iPlayer to the Xbox 360, thus conclusively debunking many rumours that have been doing the rounds for quite a while now.
In an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine, Thompson is quoted to have said: “I think the way we look at the services we have with our TV services, we’re very happy with what we’re doing with Sky.
“What we really want to do is ensure that we can differentiate and bring new things and that’s about really looking at the services we have and saying “how can we improve those and make those even more interactive and more differentiated?
“Now that we have Kinect coming to the platform as well I think that’s all we’re going to focus our energy on and that’s where we’re going to put all of our focus on in the next year.
“iPlayer is available on a lot of platforms, people connect to that content in a lot of ways today and it’s like ‘where would we add value to that particular property at this point?’ and we think we can probably add value in other areas at the moment.”
In case you remember, The Telegraph reported last year that a BBC-Microsoft deal had been in the works, but had run into trouble, since the two had allegedly been unable to come to an agreement about the pricing model. So apparently, the conflict still hasn’t been resolved.
Therefore, we can conclusively… yes, the BBC iPlayer is not coming to the Xbox 360. So stop asking.
