The BBC iPlayer has been hacked to work with the PS3 despite the company’s reluctancy to support the gaming console. Though this will consequently please many PS3 owners, the hacked iPlayer site is meant to serve a different but much bigger purpose.

What’s that purpose? To prove that the BBC could easily support the iPlayer on the PS3.

It’s mainly a demonstration of how easily the BBC could support the PS3 with their Wii version. This does nothing more than mask your PS3’s user-agent string and makes half a dozen changes to make the JavaScript and CSS function correctly on the PS3. It only took a day to produce, so come on BBC – how about implementing this properly?

Why doesn’t the BBC support the iPlayer on the PS3? We don’t know, and it seems the hacker doesn’t either. But it’s obvious it isn’t hard to do.

We’re sure the PS3 iPlayer could be configured to do a number of things, such as stream BBC content to destinations outside of the UK, but — sadly — that’s not the point here. The hacker doesn’t want to get into any legal trouble, he probably just wants some of last week’s BBC on his PS3.

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Entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 6:15 pm under Hacking, Internet, Technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Danny Mendez.
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