The BBC's streaming iPlayer for Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone has today gone live in beta.

As promised last month, the release marks the resurgent iPlayer's first foray onto mobile devices. Some programmes that are available on the desktop haven't made the leap to your pocket yet, but we're promised it's just a matter of time.

We've had a quick look on our iPod Touch via the office Wi-Fi, and it's the closest thing to watchable mobile TV we've yet seen, so thumbs up from us. The video is 400Kb/s H.264, while audio runs as a 116Kb/s AAC stream.

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It's worth noting again the BBC's deal with The Cloud means there'll be free access across thousands of public locations too. More details here. iPhone users are in the same position as iPod Touch owners: the EDGE data network is too slow for iPlayer to work.

iPlayer bigwig Anthony Rose has the lowdown on the development process and the headaches of transcoding into several formats ("50 rack-mount PCs, most of which are running really fast dual quad-core Xeon CPUs") here.

He's also soliciting votes on which devices the team should set their sights on next. ®

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