The BBC’s iPlayer Web TV portal is hugely popular in Britain but can’t be viewed overseas. No matter: With today’s revamp, and planned updates, it looks like the BBC is setting a high bar for competition in the coming Net TV revolution.

The iPlayer launched in late 2007 as a way for U.K. TV viewers to catch up with programs from Aunty Beeb that they’d missed and to view legacy footage. It was technologically clever–always seeming to stay pretty much ahead of the pirates–even while its interface was pretty simple. It’s also hugely popular, as over 1.1 billion minutes of footage are served up over the system every month. Today it’s getting its first big revamp, and the BBC has listened to the needs of its users as well as paying attention to current memes for the redesign.

The watchwords for the new site are convenience and personalization. Hence, the BBC has arranged the user landing page for so that it’s easier to find TV shows one wants to see. The player module can now be launched in a stand-alone window, meaning you can continue to watch a show while you do other things on the site, or elsewhere on the Web, much more easily. It’s also a neat way to power your TV directly with iPlayer content, if you’re one of those connected souls who’s TV is hooked up as a second monitor for your PC. Meanwhile, integrating the iPlayer profile with Facebook and Twitter accounts is now simpler, to facilitate sharing info about your shows with your friends or followers.

But this social net interactivity isn’t fast enough for the BBC, so soon the network will be building in Windows Messenger powers to the system, enabling real-time chats during program viewings. The Beeb is obviously envisaging TV show catch-up parties, with excited folks IM-nattering about this week’s goings-on by Doctor Who or whatnot … though the jury is still out over whether this is actually a good idea (check out Fox’s disastrous attempts at the same thing). In a move something akin to Facebook’s “like” button or Amazon’s “wish lists,” you can also now build lists of your favorite shows to share with people.

The revamped system is also cleverly rigged up so you can download TV show content before it’s had its first terrestrial broadcast, and although you can’t watch it during this period, it means you can do so instantly upon its TV airing. In some sense, this is the BBC enabling a Tivo-like “live TV pause” power into its service.

Recently there were a number of rumors that suggested the BBC would be bringing the iPlayer to international audiences for the first time in 2011. We’ve heard these rumors before, but this time they have a ring of authority. Earlier moves seem to have been squashed due to the BBC’s complicated status as a quasi-public owned entity, but this time many of these objections appear to have fallen away as it’s now plausible for the Beeb to easily charge overseas viewers to see the content.