One of the more inspiring developments at the BBC recently has been the extension of iPlayer away from the desktop PC. Back in April, they launched iPlayer on the Wii - but it wasn't the breakthrough moment it might have been. Leaving aside the fact it didn't stream especially smoothly on my machine, the interface was optimised for a screen resolution which the Wii couldn't deliver, making for a horrid user experience. Last week they made amends, with a Wii-optimised screen setup - and it's truly brilliant. Try it on your desktop PC, but to appreciate its full glory, you need to be sitting on the living room sofa, in proper telly-watching mode.
I've been a bit surprised that people haven't done more optimising of content for 'games consoles' - particularly the current generation, with their online capabilities. And with the Wii (again) selling like hot cakes (set to get even hotter too), it has tremendous potential for video-on-demand in the living room.
Inspired by the Beeb's efforts, I wondered how much effort it would take to put a Wii-friendly front end on some YouTube content. So I took a few hours last night to build a prototype - and here it is: wii10.puffbox.co.uk
It's basically the same concept as the BBC's design, rebuilt from scratch using a combination of PHP, RSS and Javascript (specifically, JQuery). The code pulls in the last 10 items from Downing Street's YouTube account, and puts them into a JQuery-driven carousel. When you click on a clip, a popup fades into view, and the embedded YouTube player autoplays. The big buttons left and right make the playlist scroll beautifully from side to side.
I want to stress: I've done this completely off my own bat. Although we have a continuing working relationship, I wasn't asked to do this by Number10. It's purely a proof-of-concept, using publicly available (publicly funded) material. It's a bit rough round the edges: some of the link highlighting isn't too smooth on the Wii, the word wrapping isn't polished, and it doesn't seem to work properly on (desktop) Firefox for some reason - although curiously, all other browsers seem OK, even IE! But having proven the concept, to be honest, I may not bother going back to fix these issues. There's also a risk of YouTube changing their code, as has happened before: the Wii's Flash player is a bit behind the times, and YouTube's improvements have caused problems in the past.
But for now - it works, really quite nicely, and I'm dead pleased with it. You need never again say the words 'there's nothing on telly.' 
And with more and more government content going on YouTube, if anybody thinks this might be useful in a proper business context, please get in touch.
