BBC iPlayer rejects open source plugins, takes Flash-only path

So -- when can rest of world use it?

Consider our hard earned are used to flood the known physical universe with BBC HD, BBC World, Ceebies, etc in other countries why don't they just open the d4mn thing up, get with Akamai (or similar) and broadcast all their content.

Yet another joke from White City -- "Feh, let's consume more RAM on end users systems, open more security holes with SWF, and give the punters less".

Love the logic, if commercial companies like the Beeb (oops they're a gov't "entity") did this, everyone would be broke. That's unless your coffers aren't controlled by those paying for them!

Content protection my arse

If the Beeb want to protect the content, why don't they put some proper content on it, like their back catalogue instead of picking and choosing the stuff that is usually there. Some interesting programmes are available for a week or two before being taken down. Then there's a load of crap on there that's up for months.

The Beeb has messed about with this for too long already. It's my license fee that helped to pay for the programmes and the development of this service and they're just f***ing about.

<video> and Flash security

Not helped by the brewing browser war over which codecs will be supported in <video> in HTML5.

Flash will die sooner if browser developers side with something like Ogg or if the suspended sentence of 5 years for h.264 is made unlimited.

Will the BBC be culpable with Adobe if a Linux system is hacked because Flash is installed?

BBC is pandering to the Content Provider bullies

It seems that the BBC, even being so large, cannot stand up to the bullying of the content providers who partially/wholly rely on their BBC revenue stream. The BBC are just being weak. If the BBC said "No, f*&k off, we are not going to apply DRM which is never in the consumer's interest" the content providers would just accept it in the vast majority of cases despite complaining about the fact.

Even though the open source get_iplayer with flvstreamer is slightly inconvenienced by this move (it resumes the stream every minute automatically), if you use it with rtmpdump instead of flvstreamer it works perfectly. (you have to add the rtmpdump swf verify option to the command using --rtmptvopts in get_iplayer)

rtmpdump is the open-source tool that had the Adobe DMCA takedown notice last year but has since restarted development at a much accelerated rate outside of the US.

gah!

I'm getting more and more disillusioned with the BBC, surely as a publicly funded body that is meant to be open to all license fee payers they should be focusing on accessibility with a view to promoting open standards?!!

Well fuck 'em. The iPlayer is shit anyway. It doesn't work properly on half the machines I've tried to access it from (all Linux boxes but as it's flash it should be platform independent). So far the most reliably relatively non-shit online tv service I've found is Channel 4's 4od and even that can be quite buggy.

Doh

Bugger. I hope this doesn't nix the iPlayer Downloader Mac app I use to fetch Dr Who episodes. I'll be miffed if it does.

No more mobile devices

Bang goes the unofficial iplayer app for Android then :(

SWF Ver has been around a while now

SWF Verification has been around for a while, the problem (or time it takes) is implementing it with your back-end, this can be gotten around but I won't list the ways (that is what google is for!).

I don't see why people don't understand that the BBC doesn't own most of the content it shows, have you never wondered what those productions companies are at the end of the credits? Like all other commercial providers the BBC have to show they are willing to protect the interests of the content produces.

It's not like we can just record what we see on television anyway!!! Oh wait a sec!!! In the end the content produces have created a system where you don't ever own the content yourself your 'leasing it' and then that leasing comes with plenty of conditions.

Welcome to the future!!!

Whats the point of content protecting iPlayer anyway?

Anyone who wants to keep a copy of the program can just video it off air anyway!

Some braincells need banging together down in what passes for the BBCs IT department.

Auntie Never Lies ?

"Since launch in 2007, BBC iPlayer has always used content protection in order to provide UK audiences ......"

I believe that from launch, the BBC iPlayer has in fact used 'access protection', based on the IP-address of the incoming request, to shut out non-UK viewers (which is reasonable).

This new arrangement is in fact a form of lock-in to a particular technology and I wonder if Tom 7 has hit the nail on the head.

The BBC statement is misleading to say the least.

XBMC

As a long time user of XBMC it is really sad that they have gone down this route. The kids use it mainly to watch iplayer CBBC / Cbeebies and it means there are the shows they want, when they want, without adverts. Something good that worked and the whole (non-tech) family can and did use is now broken. Now iplayer comes through the Wii, and the interface is just awful compared to XBMC. Plus, instead of digital all the way, it's now coming through a component cable.

Bad times.

Great News

At last the BBC are being a bit less anti-competitive by levelling the playing field.

Their ability to not use DRM gave them a huge advantage over all the others and now they are playing by the same rules. They are still cheating by delivering to the iPhone (sans-DRM) but maybe that will be stopped soon.

Unlucky freetards

Am I the only one that doesn't care? I can already watch a program on TV, record it on a PVR or watch it via iplayer on a PS3.. Unlucky if it affects peeps abroad who never paid a penny towards the license fee anyway or those that want it in some weird arse format to play on a spectrum 64 can just read books....

Still works with...

...like I'd post it on here!!! LOL

BBCtards

What a bunch of morons. I love using my old xBox to watch iPlayer (I live in the UK, I pay my license fee) and now I can't because some ass-hat is sucking the Adobe phallus.

We need DRM like we need a freaking hole-in the head. With the coming of HTML5, hopefully the world will wake-up to what utter crap Flash is and we can move on. but probably not.

BeebPlayer not affected:

Works for me and the developer says it isn't affected (for the moment):-

http://www.google.com/profiles/johnsto

A title

I would have thought the BBC would play this safe but they are possibly forced into this by their content providers (i.e. some companies which make content for the BBC).

The problem is this hurts the BBC both ways; they either annoy the viewers or their content providers - if they annoy their content providers may stop providing content to the BBC (Spooks, etc) and if they annoy their viewers then they will annoy there monetary stream and anyone which uses the service.

If I were them I would just tell their providers to put up or shut up as once the viewers are gone they are gone so is any of your power and money; in fact by that stage they are effectively a dieing corpse.

I wouldn't mind ditching the TV as I don't really care for it anyone (other that Channel 4 news which I can watch online) and Question Time on Thursday and it would save me like £170ish a year. TV isn't really required any more anyway as I can watch older versions of programming for both Channel 4 news and Question Time.

I think the BBC's future lies with IPTV and they are cutting their kind of shooting themselves in the foot on this one - if they haven't realised IPTV is the future then they are living in the past.

Mike

BBC iPlayer Mobile not working

Since yesterday I have been trying to watch a program on the iPlayer and its not available. I wrote to the BBC and their response was:

We're currently suffering from some severe technical problems which mean that programmes are not being delivered to BBC iPlayer for mobile. We're very sorry for any inconvenience that this causes and would like to assure you that we're doing our best to fix the problem as soon as possible.

DRM in Adobe Flash

From what I recall, there's three pieces of information used to secure an RTMP; two strings that say something along the lines of "Genuine Adobe Flash" and a big long string of bytes. The problem that rtmpdump had last year was that these three pieces of information were baked into it, and with that Adobe could toot their DMCA DRM-bypass horn to cause grief.

Now, if those three strings were provided as command line options, without their values being documented anywhere in the code, the DMCA nonsense is unlikely to stand up. Adobe would have to DMCA Google, Yahoo, Twitter and so on over and over again. We all know how well that worked with DVD's CSS...

Legality?

I'm not the person to ask about this kind of stuff, but maybe you lot can shed some light on it.

A publicly-funded organisation, which we have little choice but to pay for (ok, strictly speaking this is wrong,but you see where I'm coming from) mandates that all users need to use specific technology provided by a third party, to the anti-competitive detriment of competing third parties.

Furthermore, when those third parties adapt their product(s) to ensure continued operation, they are then sued by the favoured third party, preventing access to a state-run asset by any means other than their own.

This seems out of order to me. Thoughts?

Irony of Freedom

What amazes me, is that the people that pay and own the BBC, the general public of the UK, now suddenly are not allowed to watch their very own TV shows in their own country.

The shows on the BBC are made, by and for, the UK public and thus are a vital part of the implementation of the freedom of speech.

I don't believe that the UK public wants this limitation to the freedom of speech. What's worst, you UK guys, actually pay a lot of taxpayer money to an American company to get censored! And here's what's really funny about this: you are doing nothing to stop it, even though you own the joint hahaha! It's like, you want to be censored!?!

I live in the Netherlands. And the BBC also broadcasts here. Big fan of Spooks :) and luckily this series can be seen in many countries where the BBC airs. I would really like to thank the UK public for airing in my country! What's annoying is that, I cannot use the IPlayer to watch stuff that also gets aired here. Although I have the rights, given so generously by you guys.

Thinks really need to change how we will pay our creative people for their excellent work in a just manner. I hope we can quickly come to a solution. Limiting the freedom of speech by locking down media like the ACTA proposes and is being displayed here by the BBC is not the way forward IMHO.

Yeah!

Never mind Flash refuseniks! How about all these people who don't even want a computer?! Surely they too should be compensated for not being able to watch BBC programmes online? Some sort of electronic viewing device that receives and decodes a broadcast signal perhaps?

Seriously though, the Beeb are damned if they do and damned if they don't. For the BBC and its customers there's zero benefit to this SWF verification thing, ergo this is either Adobe twisting auntie's arm or auntie being petty and/or incompetent (again).

Hate to find myself in agreement with anything Steve Jobs says but really - the sooner Flash becomes irrelevant the better.

resource hungry flash

Having been the one to originally throw up the debug log on the xbmc forum (same username), its appaling that the BBC rely so heavily on adobe flash to impliment their iPlayer platform.

Adobe have always shown no interest in improving their platform resulting in bloated software which can tax even the most powerful of systems.

I have to remind my partner that her system is running at full tilt due to her playing a flash game or because there is a flash advert running on the web page she is looking at.

My ION box (which i use for XBMC and therefore the iPlayer plugin) was THE best thing since sliced bread. Easy to use, and perfect quality with hardware accelerated BBC. Now im stuck having to load up a web page and suffer artifacting and slow quality.

hopefully Aunti will actually sort this out, or ill have to go and get my content via less official means.

So how long...

...before someone implements get_iplayer in a Ruby/Python app which has a nice GUI and EPG, and simply grabs the FLVs, rips to MP4 and plays back in MPlayer with a single click?

I'd use that happily - get_iplayer is good, but anything that involves less terminal sessions is a good thing as far as I'm concerned...

Steven R

Meh

Ubuntu 9.10 + firefox + bbc iPlayer flash website + old laptop (1.3ghz 2GB ram) = No go.

Ubuntu 9.10 + get_iplayer + vlc + old laptop (1.3ghz 2GB ram) = works perfect.

Why are the BBC trying to either force me to upgrade to a dual core system + windows just to view shows over their iPlayer?

Still, get_iplayer still works OK at the moment, but for how long before they close the door on it?

Pardon?

Sorry, but I seem to be missing something here, but if you're a legitimate UK user, what's the proem with using iPlayer and free adobe software? I'm confident that this will piss off maybe 0.1% of legitimate users who have willfully decided to go down an unsupported path - if you fly without a parachute then don't go whinging when your plane stops working.

You wouldn't expect to be allowed to rollerskate down the M1 just 'cos you'd paid your road tax, would you?

RE: Technology breaking licences

"Quite a number of organisations have licences to record an replay TV programmes to audiences. Any UK university can get one from the Copyright Licensing Agency for a few hundred pounds a year. We can play recordings to students for ever, not just for seven days."

But the ERA licence doesn't apply to on-demand services. At all, only programmes obtained from a broadcast source, which iPlayer isn't (the legal definition of broadcast excludes any and all on-demand video services).

So that isn't an issue here.

You probably should try reading that licence of yours.

bbc

Heres a link for all those xbmc users who want iplayer back on their machine

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbiplayer/F7331806?thread=7320127

Hopefully the beeb will see sense, otherwise its back to torrents to find their programs we have already paid for!

get_iplayer web gui suggestions

Cheers guys, I'll have a look at that :-)

El Reg Comments - they deliver.

Steven R

PS: I noticed that get_iplayer is having a LOT more reconnects to get content [10+, whereas previously it would get the whole thing on one shot] but it still plays back fine without any problems.

Platform agnostic?

When the BBC consulted on iPlayer it promised that the service would be "platform agnostic". Of course it has been nothing of the sort from the outset.

platform neutral?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/service_licences/online/online_servicelicences/bbc_co_uk_servicelicence_30apr2007.txt

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/pvt/on_demand_neutrality.shtml

"BBC Executive fulfils iPlayer platform neutrality criteria - August 2009

In June 2009, in its fourth progress report to the Strategic Approvals Committee the BBC Executive reported the final implementation of a solution to provide BBC iPlayer downloads for the Mac and Linux platforms. The solution, which went live on 20 April 2009 means iPlayer is available on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Linux, thereby fulfilling the Trust’s requirement that the BBC provide a cross-platform download solution."]

Is only the OS a platform? I'm confused..

Tell them where to put it

Heres a link to their consultation

https://consultations.external.bbc.co.uk/departments/bbc/bbc-on-demand-offerings/consultation/consult_view

I've already expressed my love* for all things Flash and proprietry.

* Love may not be used in the conventional sense.