I generally like the BBC's iPlayer; it's not great, but it seems to work. However today I decided I'd watch "Have I Got News For You", based on Paul's accidental involvement. Two little problems.
Firstly, the hostname iplayer.bbc.co.uk doesn't exist. Google has made me expect that this stuff should just work; but that's not a huge problem, because Google itself told me where the thing actually was. However having it on a separate hostname would be a really smart idea, because iPlayer requires Javascript. Using a different hostname plays nicely with the Firefox NoScript plugin, and that just strikes me as a good idea.
The real problem came when I searched on the iPlayer site. Search for "have i got news for you", and you get a couple of results back. Click on the one you want, and you get sent to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00bdp78.shtml?q=have+i+got+news+for+you&start=1&scope=iplayersearch&go=Find+Programmes&version_pid=b00bdp5g, which was a 404 page which doesn't help very much. I mean, they try, but since this is a link generated by their own site, it doesn't help me very much.
So I thought "that's annoying", and was close to firing up a BitTorrent client instead when I wondered if their URI parser was unencoding the stream, and then getting confused because of all the +-encoded spaces. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00bdp78.shtml?q=yousuck&start=1&scope=iplayersearch&go=Find+Programmes&version_pid=b00bdp5g, for instance, worked perfectly. (Which doesn't help you very much, as iPlayer URIs seem to be session-restricted or something.)