The BBC has today announced a brace of improvements to iPlayer. iPlayer 2.0 is due to launch in Beta ’soon’. In a blog post, the Beeb’s Head of Digital Media Technology, Anthony Rose, runs through some of the major changes.

Improvements include making it easier to find programmes using genre pages. Want to find all the BBC’s comedy? It’ll now all be in one place. The site will also remember what you were watching last time you visited. If your laptop battery dies half way through Doctor Who, for example, you’ll be able to head back to the site later and find the programme paused at the point you left it. They’re also going RSS crazy with a feed for every page. There are lots of other tweaks to the UI too.

iPlayer has come a long way since it launched just six months ago (yes, only six months – how did we manage without it?). When it comes to improvements in the future, the sky’s the limit really. While you can stream iPlayer content over wifi to an Apple iPhone or Nintendo Wii, there are loads more devices to add to its repertoire. Personally I’d like to see a version for S60 phones and the Playstation 3.

However, what would be really fantastic would be for the BBC to do something that hasn’t really been possible before – TV scrobbling. Why don’t they take a leaf out of Last.fm’s book and allow users to keep a log of everything they watch, just as Last.fm does for users’ listening habits? That way you could compare your usage to other users and the iPlayer could recommend other programmes based on other viewers’ tastes. The new iPlayer design will have a ‘more like this’ feature on each programme’s page, but to have dynamic recomendations would be even better. I suppose we should let them get iPlayer 2.0 out of the gate first but TV Scrobbling has to be something the iPlayer team should think about for the future.

In fact, why stop there? Online video is so mature now that it should be possible for someone to come in and create a cross-platform scobbler for video. Watch something on Youtube? It gets scrobbled. Rent a film on iTunes? Scrobbled again. iPlayer? Scrobbled.

Obviously, there are some technical hurdles to jump but something like this should be possible if it hooks into the Youtube API and someone creates a plugin for iTunes and other video players. That’s what’s so exciting about the internet – anything and everything is possible and there’s something new to think about every day. I imagine we’ll have to wait a while for the ‘video scrobbler’ but I bet we won’t be waiting too long…