Congratulations BBC

On having the integrity not to bow to the commercial pressures of lock-in vendors.

You had us scared for a while there.

Awww Diddums......

"*The Reg wasn't allowed to attend the briefing because we're "always horrible" to the Beeb"

So the toys get chucked out of the pram. Typical of the BBC.

I see that Ashley Highfield also made the following comment in the BBC News article.....

"With spectrum capacity severely limited on Freeview at least until 2012 we believe quite strongly that IP (internet protocol) is a great route to getting HD out to wider audience."

Surely the "director of Future Media and Technology" cannot be THAT clueless? Does he SERIOUSLY consider that HD over our current crappy up-to-8mbps-that-only-really-gives-1.5mbps-if-you-are-lucky broadband connections is workable?

HD that is compressed to buggery is pointless.

BTW, we need an 'evil BBC' icon.

Clueless beeb

I really had to chuckle when I read "We do not believe there will be an impact on the infrastructure of the UK internet. It is more than capable of dealing with this level of demand,"

This is the outfit that can't keep messageboards running properly, have horribly bloated markup throughout their sites and stated that various text based services, like the messageboards for example, would need to be streamlined to allow for future streaming services.

On the subject of them issuing software compatible with non-M$ systems, damn right they should. You pay your TV license fee and you are not restricted to particular brands of TV and peripheral equipment. so why be restricted in your choice of OS?

PremiumTV also do this for the streamed media on their football oriented websites. Funny thing is, I've got a FLV (flash video) ripper that I can use to rip the flash stuff and then there's a reasonable little program I use to remove M$ DRM from .wmv files prior to converting them to iPod compatible .mp4

Anybody who has anything to gain from the copyrighted materials streamed over the net, will easily be able to get what they want. The only people this hurts are the general public who are being forced to use M$ products to get what they are due.

DRM sucks, as we all know. The BBC suck huge eggs and have never realy been answerable to the license fee paying public, who pay their frickin' wages and provide their budgets.

Aaaahhh.... much better now.

Speed

Never mind the OS functionality - I still can't get it to work at anything more than a crawl. It took 20 minutes to download the bloomin' software!

Silverlight?

A quick solution for the mac, BBC bosses:

If you love Microsoft so much, why not look at their new cross-platform product Silverlight? I'm not Microsoft advocate (far from it) but from what I can see, it definitely supports Mac and PC (not sure about Linux), and has DRM built-in.

It because its rubbish

The real reason for the delay is not because it doesn't fulfill the needs of the open source posse...Its because its crap, eats your bandwidth constantly unless you kill of services, the quality of the video is awful....... you can get the programs from other not so legal sources quicker, more effectively and end up with near HD quality..... It realy does blow

Isn't it Ironic?

haha (in the style of Nelson Muntz)

'because of the Windows DRM that the BBC says it is forced to use by programme makers'

Program makers who have never heard of FairUse4WM !

It is sooo easy to rip the DRM off im surprised they pay money to get it put on...

mind you the obfuscated filenames do make it a little harder, by about 5 seconds!

(Anon so beeb wont cancel my account!)

If the flash player works with Opera on the Wii...

I will literally wet myself with excitement. I've never been a fan of watching the telly on my computer. I'm hoping Opera was omitted from the article by accident...

Kontiki

I suspect that they've run into some technical issues with porting iPlayer to Mac, Linux &c. The iPlayer is basically just a wrapper around the Kontiki software which also powers channel 4's on demand offering. And Kontiki is a very windowsy beast, and getting Verisign to make it platfrom independent may cost Auntie more than she is willing to pay.

Personally, I don't really give a toss, as iPlayer is slower, more difficult to use and has less content than it's (already cross platform) black market equivalents. A streaming service might actually differentiate iPlayer from the pirate sites though, since it would be truly "on demand". But why not just extend the existing Real based streaming service, instead of investing in new Flash software? Just 'cos youtube uses it doesn't make it the best.

Your kidding?

Adding a 2nd proprietary format?

I can "download" direct off satellite to my hard disk in MPEG2 (or MPEG4 for HD) with no re-encoding or loss of quality. Schedule it automatically and 6 month later watch it on PC or stream it on LAN or burn to DVD for the Home Theater.

Explain to me why a somewhat more limited (by IP rather than satellite footprint) distribution at poorer quality needs DRM or proprietary formats.

Java

Why not 'simply' creating the player in java? Then this entire discussion about platforms would be unnecessary.

Clueless

The whole iPlayer system is misconceived. It strikes me that at no point has anyone in the BBC sat down and asked WHY people would use this type of service. As has already been said, what people really want is the archive, and to be able to access content when they're away from their TV, which guess what, often means when they're abroad. The BBC will fire back with the standard "rights issues" argument (they can't even put current shows like Torchwood on there because of rights, which beggars belief, frankly), but I'd argue they should consider getting their lawyers and techies to talk to each other. Why the hell they don't develop an auth system around the TV licence (they claim to know where and who we are after all) so they could then tell rights holders they are only "broadcasting" to licence payers, God only knows.

Right now, iPlayer is just a poorly-executed gimmick, that doesn't even fulfil its own low expectations (it was two days putting Top Gear on there last week).

A load of Wii

@ Stuart Harrison

If the Beeb use Flash 7 (Like YouTube) it should work with the Wii.

Flash?

Are you fucking kidding me?

And this is to PACIFY Mac and Linux users??

I don't know why I have to spell this out over and over - EMM PEG FOUR - AITCH TWO SIX FOUR, AY AY SEE.

How hard can it be?

Christ on a Peugeot Speedfight!

Ashley Highfield is a Microsoft crony

I sense a disturbance in the force, not something I have felt since - http://informitv.com/articles/2006/03/21/billgatespreviews/

People will still whine

There's still going to be huge amounts of whining when Americans realise they'll implement IP based location filtering for these videos and watching videos through a proxy is a horrible experience. The majority of the people who complained in the first place weren't licence payers.

Still, at least the BBC will now spend a fortune of licence fee money having to implement this web based solution as well just so a minority portion of the minority audience that will use this service can watch QVGA videos.

If opensource people actually got off their high horse and developed a cross platform DRM system, then this whole situation could've been avoid. Instead they whine that the BBC are picking one of two DRM options (the other being realmedia) without presenting them with any options other than "remove the DRM even though licences for shows make this impossible!!!!"

Secure DRM?

@ Tim J

"If there's no secure DRM mechanism available for the Linux, then the BBC won't release iPlayer for Linux."

There is no secure DRM. Full Stop. End of story. The whole premise behind DRM is broken. The player MUST contain the means to revert the encrypted / protected data into its clear form. Therefore any DRM implementation will ALWAYS be susceptible to reverse engineering.

Missing Point

>> A secure DRM mechanism for Linux - is it really possible?

A secure DRM mechanism for Windows through obscurity by hiding the code - is it really secure?

Well we all know the answer is no; if or when the open source community decides to implement a DRM scheme or some form of encryption the fact that the source code is available will force it to be more secure by nature. If it's not possible to make OSS DRM then it's not possible to make secure DRM.

El Reg not allowed in!

"*The Reg wasn't allowed to attend by the BBC."

Surely to coin the BBC's own style it should be "Due to reporting restrictions The Register can not report from inside the BBC, instead..."

Secure DRM where?

If you can see it it is decoded!

ever heard of a video?

No such thig as Secure DRM..

The problem *is* DRM

DRM, in whatever guise, is poorly implemented and totally redundant. It *is* the problem.

I simply don't believe the argument that the need for DRM is something being forced on the BBC by programme makers.

Given that half the BBC's new media management either used to work for Microsoft (or enjoy giving presentations with senior Microsoft executives) I'd be more willing to believe the pressure is coming from Redmond.

Microsoft know they're loosing the initiative on software innovation, so controlling content is the next money spinner.

@Rob McDougall re. Silverlight. It's a scam designed to proliferate DRM by stealth.

250K downloads?

and how many actually use the system regularly or like me downloaded it in the vain hope that all the criticism was just whining only to find it is in fact an unadulterated piece of crap. It's slow, poor quality rubbish.

As for rights to shows, here's a thought - shoot the monkey who signs the contracts to make the bloody shows and get a proper lawyer FFS.

Mind you, they can't even keep the radio player working for more than a few weeks at a time....

BBC gives alternative BETTER than the original plan.

This is crazy - why on earth don't the BBC just dump iPlayer? The alternative is better than the original - why on earth do I want to download stuff to my machine to play wasting valuable storage space?

I'd much rather have the content on a BBC server that I can stream to my PC/Handheld/3G Mobile/Plamtop rather than a poor imitation of BitTorrent.

So the BBC has to buy some new chunky servers. I'm more happier for my licence fee to go on that rather than dodgy software with horrid DRM that onlty works on one platform (well sort of I can run iPlayer in vmware on my mac - but that's a different story)

@Smell My Finger

...why? Does it smell of Ashley, Bill or Balm?

iPlayer works just fine

I'm not a DRM zealot - it's their copyright and if The Beeb wish to try (and probably ultimately fail) to place restrictions on its use, that's up to them. But I find the iPlayer to work well and produce perfectly acceptable quality - it's not HD, but it doesn't claim to be.

And BTW it downloads rather than streams because not everyone in the country has a high-speed broadband connection.

Or maybe it's just me??

Title

Im curious to just how much of the Tv licening fee has been poured into this project and how many non uk licence fee payers will have access to this?

the sooner the bbc has to fund itself instead of being given unlimited cash by the british public to fund what ever it chooses the better

@ Andy B

... "With spectrum capacity severely limited on Freeview at least until 2012 we believe quite strongly that IP (internet protocol) is a great route to getting HD out to wider audience."

Surely the "director of Future Media and Technology" cannot be THAT clueless? Does he SERIOUSLY consider that HD over our current crappy up-to-8mbps-that-only-really-gives-1.5mbps-if-you-are-lucky broadband connections is workable?

More to the point, for someone who is **supposed** to understand technology, I'm absolutely amazed that he thinks HD on DTT will be available after 2012. Quite simply, unless something changes before then, the government will have sold off the bandwidth required for HD - it's quite clear that OfCom doesn't see any merit in retaining any more spectrum than is required for the current muxes for use by TV.