Hacker News Reader

Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re misunderstanding. This was built. The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.

I'm in the UK and our local ISP was doing Video on Demand over TCP/IP around 2000, it also had online shopping (deals with local stores), movies and TV shows.

They where early with a massive ADSL rollout so they had the bandwidth when much of the country was still on dial-up.

We had it as part of the beta period when I lived at home and it was really good for the time.

Actually earlier than that, 2002/3 iirc, I know as I tried it out and it at the time used a p2p distribution method, which was a bit aggressive and you could close the client and still get requests days later from other clients due to caching.

Which for online gaming and the cutting edge broadband of 1MB down, just didn't sit well with me. So I gave up on it.

Also of note, they did trial 3G before it rolled out publicly with Three and one of the first tests was to stream a film, which they did (The Matrix) as a test, this was 2002 . I know this as spoke with few of the chaps working on it at the time over lunch one day as I was working for the World Service upon a digital playout system that would see the death of tape and full digital end-end system for the entire BBC radio output. Fun times.

Though around that time the current government (Labour) was busy outsourcing much of the BBC and we saw many whole area's tupped out, which was sad as I'd previously worked at the DOH and saw the whole splitting up and effective prioritisation of whole rafts of the DOH/NHS under the guise of outsourcing and other less well thought out short term quick fix, long -term debt bombing nightmares.

See that's kinda the thing - politics and such things often clash and in the UK it's been a see-saw of one party then the other which has seen many short-sighted moves for short term on paper gains of back patting, and the fallout pushed onto the other party once they take power. Hence many things over the past few decades been stymied and handicapped in the UK in government departments. Seen some serious talent wasted, messed about and general mistreated - just to make a set of accounts look good in the short term.

Yep, the barriers were purely legal, not technical.

So who cares if it was the first? USSR won the space race at the time, and where are they now?

The only country capable of sending scheduled passenger carrying trips to the ISS?

"I think you’re misunderstanding."

Actually, the misunderstanding is yours. Technical issues are a small part of the challenge. The 'iPlayer' is not the product, for the most part, the content is.

Why would the BBC not be at something of an advantage over Netflix when it came to content?

Because UK competitors are not going to provide the BBC any content, and they don't have the kind financing to buy from the US, who even then were not up for this kind of deal and it took an incredible bit of BD innovation by Netflix to even get that going. The BBC would have been be able to put its own content on the web, and not much more, which is not much of an innovation.

Finally, there's a good reason the BBC's charter is limiting in scope, like any other business, how would you like it if you were suddenly found out of a job because someone with incredible power in the government was able to waive their hands, raise taxes/fees thereby 'forcing customers to exist' for their competing product, which is probably inferior by virtue of the fact they don't actually have to provide much value at all and can continue on with their guaranteed revenue stream?

That’s not entirely fair IMO. The BBC already had deals with ITV and Channel 4 to put their content on the new Project Kangaroo service before it was killed off.

It's fair because there's an underlying competitive issue: if said new project represented in any way a threat to those other entities, they would not, or stop providing the content.

For example, Disney has pulled their content from Netflix.

> The BBC iPlayer was streaming video to the whole of the U.K. in 2007.

Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer. So no innovation from them happened until a new challenger approached.

I was on holiday in another country and attempted to watch iPlayer shows and access was blocked (and is still blocked) even with a VPN and I used to pay for their TV license at the time. I'm not surprised why many kids these days choose online instead of TV to watch when they want, where-ever they want rather than wait. Also BBC iPlayer programmes still have a habit of 'vanishing' if you wait too long.

The technology was available only in the UK and the BBC was ahead of its time with iPlayer but Netflix said "Thanks for your idea and we're very inspired by the BBC..." and repeated this and made it accessible to the whole world which the BBC is still left wondering why they didn't succeed after getting disturbed by Netflix in 2010.

Classic tale of the tortoise and the hare.

> Exactly. In 2007, The BBC believed that the UK == The World with iPlayer

The complaints you make are largely directives from the regulator. The BBC has only recently managed to get the regulations relaxed so it is permitted to keep programming on iPlayer longer than a couple of weeks. The lack of access outside the UK largely stems from its requirement to licence content from independent producers and enable them to re-sell the content to other international broadcasters. You couldn't watch iPlayer overseas because in many cases the BBC (due to regulators' directives) did not hold the rights to show its programming to you outside the UK.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com