Customers of The Cloud's UK Wi-Fi Hotspots will now have access to all of the BBC's latest online content (including its P2P based iPlayer service) for free thanks to a new agreement.

Naturally the BBC's content is already free so you might be wondering what the big deal is? The key here is that you won't have to pay The Cloud's subscription fee to access BBC content, which will be delivered via a new Adobe FLASH based player:


In addition the BBC has confirmed that its iPlayer service will be accessible to Apple Mac and Linux machines by the end of this year. However some features, such as the ability to download and keep content on your machine for a limited period, may not be immediately available.

The BBC News Online summary states that over 250,000 people are now believed to be using the iPlayer service. This figure is expected to hit 500,000 by April 2008. Downloadable high definition (HD) content should follow.

Finally the BBC is known to be in talks with several unknown UK ISP's about the potential impact on their services. We wouldn't be surprised if one of those happened to be Tiscali, given its historically vocal stance on the subject (here).