With the BBC’s Internet TV service, iPlayer, set to launch in open Beta tomorrow, the public service broadcaster is facing mounting criticism because the application runs on Windows-based computers only. An e-petition on the UK government’s own website is calling for the iPlayer to be made compatible with computers running the Mac OS and Linux, and has so far collected over 10,000 “signatures”, prompting the BBC to reiterate its claim that a version which supports other operating systems will be made available “as soon as possible”.

Joost co-founder, Niklas Zennström, has revealed that the Internet TV service now has one million Beta testers, and is on track to fully launch by the end of the year. Speaking at a Skype press event, Zennström also acknowledged the challenge of scaling the peer-to-peer video platform, and stressed that the company’s main priority was ease-of-use.

While the numbers are impressive — as Mike Arrington notes, that’s a lot of Beta testers — the way the application has been marketed through a viral invite-only strategy, combined with a disproportionate amount of media coverage (compared to rivals such as Babelgum), I’m not that surprised that they’ve persuaded 1 million users to sign-up. However, trying the application once, and actually using Joost as a regular source of ‘television’, are two completely different things. My experience, and anecdotal evidence from friends, is that there simply isn’t enough compelling or unique content available yet (especially in Europe) to warrant regular use. To that end, it may well be that the chosen launch date won’t be based on technical considerations, but on securing enough new content to satisfy a major marketing blitz.

Since we launched last100, just over eight weeks ago, I’ve been obsessively trying out every Internet TV application that I can get my hands on. To assist some of our newer readers, here’s a quick recap of the Internet TV apps we’ve profiled so far.

Note: Many of the following applications offer very different features and solve different problems. This post isn’t designed to be a product comparison — because it would be like comparing apples with oranges — but instead serves as an overview of some of our coverage to-date.

The UK-based 24-hour news channel, Sky News, has announced that European viewers will now be able to access its content on the ‘pay-as-you-go’ Internet TV service, Jalipo (see our review). The News Corp-owned channel joins other news organizations including BBC World, EuroNews and Al Jazeera, who have all struck up partnerships with the web-based Internet TV service, since it launched earlier this year.

Rather than charging a subscription fee or funding content through advertising, Jalipo content is viewed in exchange for J:Credits, the company’s own online currency. Jalipo’s strategy hinges on the idea that micro-payments are the key to getting Internet users accustomed to paying for content, in an attempt to emulate the success of ring-tone sales or SMS text-messaging, for example.

This is a guest post by Ryan Jarrett. Ryan is a UK-based IT consultant and blogs regularly on digital content.

The BBC will launch their long-awaited iPlayer this Friday, which has the potential to change the way television is watched by the masses. In this post we examine what the iPlayer is promising, the BBC’s future developments for TV over the internet, and how rival networks are competing for our bandwidth.