The BBC reports that more than 10,000 people have signed an e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website urging the BBC to make its iPlayer available to non-Windows users.

At the time of writing, 10,006 people had signed the petition calling for the Prime Minster to instruct the BBC to provide the iPlayer for other operating systems, such as Linux or Apple’s OS X. iPlayer is the BBC’s online on-demand television service which was launched last month. It will be available for public download on 27 July – but only for Windows XP users.

With numbers like these, the flame is being put to the BBC and other organisations are facing similar pressure to ensure their products, services and websites are usable across all platforms. Propeller have been committed to cross-platform and cross-browser web development from our very inception. The fact is that developing for all platforms should not incur higher costs, in some instances the opposite is true. Developers ignoring the increasing numbers of web users abandoning Internet Explorer and accessing the web from non-Windows platforms such as Apple’s OSX and Linux do so at their peril.