Monday, August 31, 2026

What's up, BBC??

The logo for BBC iPlayer, the BBC's online streaming service

It has for many years been one of the central comforting rituals of my life to catch up on Saturday's Premier League action over a good cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, with the BBC's iconic 'Match of the Day' highlights programme on the iPlayer.

But this weekend, Auntie Beeb was trying to spoil my Sunday pleasure. Saturday's 'Match of the Day' somehow did not exist. Well, it did, of course - but it was stubbornly invisible to the in-site search engine. And it didn't even appear on the programme's 'Series page', which is supposed to archive all the currently available episodes.

I had to find the daily archive of Saturday's programme schedule and scroll down to the bottom to find 'Match of the Day' in its usual late-night slot (typically starting at around 11pm, UK time). Such a bother!

It's an oversight in the 'indexing', it would appear: they've posted the programme without putting up any of the usual links to other parts of the site that let you know it's there. I wonder if this is just a piece of carelessness by some overworked drone at the Television Centre, or a transient technical glitch, or.... if the bastards are actually 'hiding' the programme deliberately,... perhaps to try to promote the new(ish) feature of making individual match highlights available. (These are, admittedly, quite handy if you're in a hurry - or if you just want to easily rewatch one particularly entertaining game - but they are just the game action; there's none of the post-match discussion and analysis, and you don't even get the team lineups at the start; so, they're a very poor substitute for the normal programme.)


I am now waiting trepidatiously to see if the Sunday edition will 'appear' as normal in the next hour or so....

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