Last week I wrote about the BBC doing a deal with Nintendo to get the iPlayer on the Wii.

I also speculated about the reasons why Nintendo was the first of the current generation of consoles to get the iPlayer, rather than the 360 or PS3.

Top Gear on the iPlayerI felt that Microsoft's need to swallow the iPlayer into the Xbox Live network may have been a step too far for the BBC, while the situation with PS3 seemed a bit more opaque because a small tweak to the console's built-in browser should have the iPlayer up and running very easily.

Well, it looks like some enterprising PS3 owner has acted unprompted to get the iPlayer up and running on the PS3.

Type the URL ps3iplayer.com in a PS3 browser and it will play streaming iPlayer programmes.

I've not tried it myself but comments on some blogs report mixed success with getting it to work.

The creator of ps3iplayer.com also has some choice words for the BBC:

    It's mainly a demonstration of how easily the BBC could support the PS3 with their Wii version. This does nothing more than mask your PS3's user-agent string and makes half a dozen changes to make the JavaScript and CSS function correctly on the PS3. It only took a day to produce, so come on BBC - how about implementing this properly?


UPDATE:
It's clear this development hasn't gone unnoticed inside the BBC. Anthony Rose, the BBC's head of of digital media technology, has written on our sister blog, the BBC Internet blog, about ps3iplayer.com

He's impressed. He also says iPlayer on PS3 is being investigated and will be launched officially "in due course".

I hope PS3 owners are pleased.