The BBC’s director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, has announced that the corporation’s iPlayer will be re-engineered to work with the Mac.

The iPlayer, the BBC’s tool for viewing content from its archive on-demand was originally designed to work with Microsoft’s Windows and Internet Explorer.

Highfield, speaking at an industry conference in Cannes, said Apple’s ‘proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches,’ but, ‘it is one of our top priorities to re-engineer our proposed BBC iPlayer service to work on Macs’.

It seems that an intervention from the BBC Trust, which invited licence payers to fill in an online form with comments on the proposals may have provide feedback which led to a re-think. Mac sites such as MacUser linked to the form and suggested that surfers lt the BBC know that they wanted a Mac version.

Apple’s ‘proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches,’

It’s not all good news, however. The BBC said that iPlayer would be available first for Windows and then for the Mac and set-top boxes at a later date.

The iPlayer will provide a seven-day catch-up for BBC programmes as well as access to the BBC’s archive content. An archive trial will provide around 1000 hours of content from a mix of genres to a closed group of people and 50 hours for general access.

The iPlayer is expected this year but is still subject to approval from the BBC Trust. Highfield also commented that the BBC was lobbyng Ofcom for allocation of spectrum in order to be able to provide high definition content on Freeview.

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