I disagree with how you've framed this. When you say "All they want to do is play video with some UI around it." that is solved, it's fairly easy and works fine.

At issue here is DRM and the BBC's need (probably contractually mandated by the rights holders) to control what you can do with their content on your devices. It's about control, not about simple delivery.

I use Linux only and when I visited the opt-in page with Firefox I received the following error message: "Sorry, we can't provide you with the HTML5 Player beta because your browser doesn't support Media Source Extensions. Please try another browser. Only Google Chrome is supported on your platform at this time." Testing the same page with Chromium and it worked fine. I won't use Chrome and won't install Flash so I was pleased to see it working with Chromium.

Looking at the bigger picture, it's still easier for me to use youtube-dl and grab the videos that way. The quality is higher and even on my gigabit fiber broadband, I got some buffering and the frame rate dropped which showed significant tearing in the playback. At least CPU use was much lower than with Flash.

The future isn't Flash, it's HTML5 video and I'm pleased to finally have something that works for us Linux users who don't use Flash. Nice work BBC iPlayer team and if any of you are reading this comment I say thanks.

Edit: formatting