Now we believe that our Player .... will drive broadband. [via BBC - Press Office - Mark Thompson Baird Lecture]
Why is it "our Player". Does the BBC make TV sets, does it make any of the freeview boxes, does it may VHS recorders or PVRs? Why then must it make the broadband player. Why not open this up to market innovation in UI? Implement a bunch of services via backstage.co.uk, provide an SDK of redistributable components for Windows/Linux and Mac that allows people to access the protected content but put their own UI around it. Some people will put free things together, some might charge in the same way that you pay for a telly. Some might put together something that allows mash up of BBC output, YouTube etc - very Web 2.0 - perhaps that is the intention and I have missed it.
What I fear is that peoples PCs'/Media PCs will end up with a whole load of different players for different contexts - a success of the web has been you stay in the same appwhereever you go. With the BBC player concept as I've seen it so far, this breaks down and fails to acknowledge that serendipity extends beyond the walls of the BBC.