For his part, Rose is excited about the chance to work with Jeff Bezos as an investor.

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The veteran comic rose to prominence on BBC radio with his work on the Goons, and was knighted in 1981.

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"By the time we closed the transaction on June 11 we had the brunt of the work all done, " says John Rose, who quit Digital in 1992 after a dispute with then-president Kenneth Olsen and now heads Compaq's Enterprise Computing Group.

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The cross-platform nature of Adobe AIR means the iPlayer will work with Open Source and Apple Mac computers "out of the box" on 18 December, said Mr Rose.

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