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The BBC has been connecting news, sport and iPlayer content to mobile devices for "a very long time" its director of Future, Media and Technology told delegates at the Guardian Changing Media Summit 2010 . Erik Huggers used the occasion to respond to rival media attacks on the BBC's plans to develop mobile applications for its content.

In February the corporation announced that BBC News and BBC Sport were "to be repurposed" for smartphones such as iPhone, Blackberry and Android mobiles. But some broadcasters and newspapers claimed plans were outside the BBC's remit. "There has been some interesting comment in the press," Huggers told interviewer BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, but denied mobile app development was anything new to the BBC.

"In fact we already have applications up and running in the Nokia Ovi store, we have news applications running on Samsung devices.

"What we're now doing is making the next leap into the world of Apple," he said. The aim, he said, was to make sure that "the same news that you get on the BBC website ... you will be able to get on your iPhone."

"Apps for me are no different from a browser. They really aren't. They are the exact same content, the exact same pictures, the exact same words. We don't do any more work on it. It's just that the form factor of the phone, the browser simply doesn't work that well.

The best ways to find and consume content are through applications, he said

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Written by
Judith Townend

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