On demand TV is great and all, but what if the program you're wanting is on right now? Previously -- in the UK at least -- you'd have to either catch the whole thing later, or accept you'd missed a bit, and watch the rest live. Starting today, however, iPlayer will let you rewind, pause, and even start live shows from the beginning. In fact with the "Live Restart" update, you'll be able to go back over the last two hours of scheduled TV, should you wish. The new features come as a result of the BBC switching to "HTTP chunked" streaming instead of RTMP, which breaks up the H.264 video feed into blocks, delivering them like regular web packets -- apparently improving scalability, adaptive bitrate playback and cost effectiveness, compared to Content Delivery Networks. All we want to know is will you be able to skip the ads? Oh wait.

BBC 'Live Restart' brings pause, rewind and 'start from beginning' to iPlayer live streams originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.