Television is literally everywhere these days. Gone are the days where you came home to watch four channels on your 21" CRT Television, now we have hundreds of channels, 50" widescreen Plasma or LCD Hi-Definition televisions, television on our computers, laptops and portable devices and now even on our mobile phones thanks largely to the BBC's iPlayer. The iPhone though is restricted to only being able to stream programs from iPlayer which basically restricts you to only doing this when you have a Wi-Fi connection. Until now.

iPlayer Downloader is a great free program for the Apple Mac that changes all of that. It is an incredibly simple program to use as when you run it a window opens showing you the standard iPlayer browser. Here you browse by genre, channel or simply search for your favourite program and then when you find it you just click on it and the program starts to download.

iPlayer Downloader automatically downloads them in a format and size suited for the iPhone because it effectively pretends to be an iPhone. This means that when the program has downloaded you just need to import it into iTunes in order to view it on your iPhone.

But why do you need iPlayer Downloader when the BBC's own iPlayer desktop application also lets you download programs? Well the problem with the BBC's application is that you can only download some programs for portable media devices which means that often what you download is too large for the iPhone and would need converting to work on it and because whatever your download is DRM protected meaning that you only have a limited time in which to watch the programs. Because iPlayer Downloader emulates the iPhone which natively can only stream from iPlayer and not download it means that none of the programs are DRM protected and so you can watch them over and over again for as long as you want.

iPlayer Downloader can be download for free from here

One other useful tip is how to get your downloaded TV programs to appear in iTunes under TV Shows instead of Movies. By default any video file you import into iTunes will automatically appear in Movies regardless of whether it is a film, concert, or TV program and no amount of dragging will move the video files to anywhere else. This is because iTunes sorts videos based on their metadata. So to get your TV programs into iTunes just follow this easy guide.

01 In iTunes go to File>Add File to Library and locate your TV shows.

02 Your TV program will now appear under Movies so go to Movies, find your program, right click on it and select Get Info.

03In the window that opens click on the Options Tab where you will see a drop down list for Media Kind. At present this will say Movie, simply change that to TV Show. If you click OK now the program will instantly move to TV Shows but there is one other thing you can do to organise your TV shows which will help if you intend to download an entire series, so don't click OK just yet.

04 Now click on the Video Tab and here you can enter the title of the TV show, the series number, episode number and episode ID. If you had for example downloaded the entire series of Mock The Week and entered this information than all of these shows from that series would appear in one folder under TV Shows. This not only keeps your library tidy but it also helps when it comes to synching your iPhone because you could set iTunes to only upload the most recent unviewed programs from that series or if you had downloaded several different series to upload only the 5 most recent unviewed programs from each series.

It really is so simple and if like me you have a very long daily commute it's really nice to be able to pass the time watching new content every day instead of watching the same films over and over again.