Following huge speculation throughout the blogosphere and beyond, David Madden, Executive Product Manager for BBC iPlayer on Mobile, has attempted to reinforce the corporations commitment to the mobile platform.

Analysts have speculated that the imminent budget cuts at the BBC will mean a retrenching towards core activities of which mobile has yet to be part of. Yet despite these rumours, the BBC announced in early July 2010 that it was extended its range of supported mobile devices to Android 2.2 phones.

However, Madden revealed that the The BBC Trust is conducting a review of the BBC's plans to develop smartphone apps in general and pending the outcome of the BBC Trust review, the BBC will therefore not be launching any Android apps or apps for any other smartphone in the UK

In outlining mobile strategy, Madden emphasised thatmobile was very much part of the BBC Online Service Licence issued in May 2010 which describes the iPlayer on mobile as being tasked with maximising reach on mobile platforms while delivering a high quality BBC service in a cost-effective way. Yet, Madden, postulated, the big question that the BBC , and other content providers right across the industry, faced was how to scale services across multiple mobile platforms in a cost and resource efficient way?

Madden conceded that Rolling out new BBC iPlayer features across all mobile platforms would also be increasingly expensive as would the associated testing and support effort. He pointed out that some compromises were necessary.

He said, "Our approach has been to build a scalable website that works in the phone's web browser and can be easily tweaked to achieve that high quality experience on a range of internet enabled mobile devices...We could have enabled the BBC iPlayer on mobile website on all video enabled phones without any restrictions or exceptions. This would have maximised our reach, but would have resulted in a very poor quality experience on many phones as video playback capabilities and web browser rendering vary across devices. Some users would have had a good experience while others suffered a sub-optimal service with features not working and poor video playback quality.

"The BBC iPlayer should enable licence fee payers to access BBC programming quickly, easily and in a high quality format. In doing so, it should aim to be regarded as a high quality BBC service by its users and so contribute to their approval of the BBC."