David Farnor | On 18, Oct 2014

BBC iPlayer enjoyed a big makeover this year, improving the BBC’s VOD service with easier menus and slicker design. But another cool, new feature has arrived in the past week that you may not be aware of: you can now add music tracks you hear in TV programmes to your own music playlist.

Playlister – BBC’s playlist-building service – works with Spotify, iTunes and other platforms to let you export and listen to music tracks. It launched one year ago in Beta and seen over 10 million tracks added to around 200,000 playlists. While users have always used it to curate songs played in radio shows and TV shows, it is now possible to add them to Playlister directly from iPlayer.

You need to be logged in to BBC iD to do this. BBC iD is the BBC’s user account system and is primarily used for Playlister, rather than for BBC iPlayer – although personalisation remains a key focus for video on-demand services, so we would expect the playlist feature to be the first step towards further integration of BBC iD into iPlayer functionality. (Indeed, the new homepage for BBC Music now offers personalised music recommendations to users based on the tracks they have added to Playlister.)

The ability to add music tracks is currently only available to desktop browser users, but the BBC says they will monitor usage and audience feedback over the coming months before rolling it out to other platforms. Until then, if you really like what Charlie Fairhead’s listening to on his iPod in Casualty, or dig paramedic Josh’s new jam, iPlayer has you covered.

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