Introducing the new BBC iPlayer
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Yes, well. It's not like the publically financed television stations of EUrope have FUCKING MORAL OBLIGATION to help the free movement of people throughout Europe by making the programs that connect them with their home country and that they paid for available to them. And the BBC is _by far_ not the worst offender here.
I mean, even YLE, which should be happy that anybody outside of Finland wants to participate in the madness that is the Finnish language, blocks me based on my IP!
Of course, I am well aware that I am a German citizen and thus not paying into the BBC financing. This is of course an insourmountable obstacle, today in 2014.
It's not like there was any possible way to track which countries the programmes are watched from and then install some transfer payment systems between the publically financed broadcasters of the different countries.
Admittedly, our public broadcasters here in Germany have an annual budget of only 7.5 Billion Euros, so this is impossible to finance.
Man, I'm frustrated about this. Why is the media world so broken? Who runs a television station and then makes a significant effort to _keep_ people from watching it, even though them doing so has no or negligible impact on their budget?
Not to mention how I really hate GEMA here.
Other times, this will be due to the British government not wanting to be seen to be undercutting commercial providers in other countries (there's enough pressure on the government in how the BBC is run from commercial providers in the UK).
What's more frustrating is when the BBC produces content (e.g. via BBC Worldwide or BBC Foreign Service) which isn't available in the UK. Fortunately that's fairly rare.
The BBC probably gets a better price for externally produced programming if they limit their broadcast rights to the UK because the producer can then go sell the program abroad without having to compete with BBC iPlayer.
Conversely, for internally produced programming, if it's good, there's revenue to be made from selling that programming abroad. In Denmark, BBC channels are premium channels on cable.
Impossible to finance? Probably not. But it's significant cost, and despite your assertion, the BBCs fiduciary responsibility is to the UK license fee payers, not the average european citizen. That said, providing a login with your license fee receipt so those can watch iPlayer abroad would probably be doable.
That is where transfer payments between the publically fincanced broadcasters come in. Make one big nice platform where every EUropean can watch all the non-third-party content and then distribute part of the public broadcasting revenue to those broadcasters whose content was watched by users in other countries.
I know this is not realistic, but from my point of view it looks as if the only reason we don't have something like this is that the people in the right places just don't care.
Hell, I can see frustration at what could or should be a commercially workable model not being in place but saying that there is some moral obligation based on the EU Freedom of Movement is bullshit and then some.
Seriously I love Europe and I love the EU but the minute TV becomes a moral right I will march on Brussels with a flaming torch myself.
If you say there is no moral obligation, then what is the reason for the BBC or ARD or YLE or TVE or RAI to even exist?
Publically financed broadcasting is based on the idea that the people should have some sort of neutral-ish source of information. If you strip away all the stuff that has been put on top (football rights, TV dramas and the like), it comes back to that. On a side note, it is actually a discussion that is taking place over here in Germany, whether or not entertainment is part of the mission of ARD and ZDF.
Now why should there be a magical wall on the border of the island, beyond which the British citizens don't have the right to be informed?
One could argue that it is completely irrelevant whether or not _I_ can watch the BBC, but there is a moral obligation towards the expat Brits.
http://europe.bbcentertainment.com/about-iplayer/
It's downloadable from the iTunes store and you have to pay to watch. I have no idea what content they provide: I presume it's what they consider most likely to sell or appeal to a mass audience. If you're after interesting or specialised BBC documentaries, you might be out of luck.
Regarding radio, all the BBC radio stations can be listened to live if you're outside the UK (but not through iPlayer catch-up). There's also a podcasts directory
But that's a very different thing to making Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who available to expats and others as a "cultural lifeline". Part of leaving a country is that you do leave things behind and I don't see why TV is something people should be entitled to any more than they are to red London buses, policeman in strangely impractical hats or Ribena and Marmite.
Even aside from the practical challenges around licencing of content, I'm not sure the British TV licence payer has any interest in funding a global TV network, and even if we did would having this behemoth of broadcasting available across the world have a positive or negative impact on local stations, particularly in smaller English speaking countries?
Having spoken to Sony and my ISP, they're both suggesting that the administrative side of iPlayer is a mess. The former tell them that the BBC regularly breaks their codecs and metadata streams and the latter suggest that the BBC rarely update their geographical IP databases.
Not a great experience.
It's bad when you have to hit the proxy torrent sites to view content you already paid for with your TV license...
I'm hoping this is going to be incorporated into the new iPlayer when watching live, because it seems mad to have this functionality missing depending on which part of the site you're watching live from.
Also, I'm hoping the keyboard controls will be improved. It'd be nice for the spacebar to function as pause/play and the left right arrows to skip in much smaller increments so they're actually useful.
The skipping increment being too large also affects my Humax HDR-1000S, where you can only jump in 1 minute blocks, which is far too big to be useful when seeking to the start of something. 10 seconds would be far better.
edit: The site's just offered me a go on the trial and it looks like most of the things I wanted have actually been implemented. Excellent stuff!
What is it that makes it harder to support subtitles in downloads rather than streaming? I suppose I can see that with streaming you can serve up subtitled or non-subtitled streams according to user preference, but iOS has native support for subtitles in video.
Is this some kind of crappy contractual/rights-holder thing, where "mobile devices" have to be negotiated separately?
What is wrong with using an establish platform like Flash? iPlayer works, and works well. I happy to see BBC continuing to improve.
I don't see anything close to resembling epic fail with iPlayer.
That's just a few reasons off the top of my head. When you consider the fact that they support iPhones / iPads, they are already streaming h264, so why not do it in HTML5?
We don't know how their development cycle looks or their backend. There is probably a reason they chose not to do HTMl5 at this moment. It will probably come in due time. Worth noting is that Youtube mostly remains on Flash, though they do have HTML5 beta.
HTML5 is still quite a new technology while Flash is well established, despite its flaws.
> I don't bother to install Flash on my desktop, I just use Chrome when I need it.
Most people don't know, care or understand what flash is. They want something that works and don't really care if it isn't as secure as something else or use slightly more resources. HN is not really representative for the public at large.
(They know it's a lie, they have to pretend it isn't. There's basically an eternal free-floating culture war in the BBC between the sort of people who think DRM works and the sort of people who think it doesn't. The BBC is a ridiculously non-monolithic entity.)
Flash is less-worse than their original plan ... a fat client application written in C#, because of course that works everywhere.
Also, isn't the iPlayer video loaded differently to most online video providers? If I remember correctly, they don't load the full video in the same way that the likes of YouTube does. Is that easily done with HTML5?
BitTorrent
BitTorrent isn't.
And the BBC is involved with that. So what is different here?
Furthermore, if they were to lose the ridiculous DRM requirements for programs (programmes?) which are already paid for, they could even use the actual Bittorrent protocol itself.
You are correct that currently iOS streams are protected by client certs and that is sufficient enough in that ecosystem. On Android and desktop, there is still a need for a sufficient level of content protection, but as I said a big reason we are using Flash on those platforms is the cross-platform support and the engineering efforts at the moment. I can't really comment more on future directions around this area, but needless to say we are constantly evaluating the different emerging streaming technologies out there.
Things for me that I'd like to see (as I can see some of the devs on here)
1. Content - I see no reason why the BBC doesn't put all of it's content on the iPlayer.
2. Timelimit - Abandon the 7 day window time limit, it simply doesn't fit with our modern lives, Netflix has proved that.
3. Ability to log in using my TV Licence as an ID, that way I could stream content from another country (on holiday for example, or a business trip).
Great work though guys, thank you.
[1] For US folks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...
Some of the issues were touched on by QI creator John Lloyd, when they were trying to get QI licensed for the US(only source I found was dead link referenced by wiki). There are so many differences in licensing around the movie clips and songs used in episodes between countries that what the Beeb can play under fair use in the UK would be prohibitively expensive elsewhere.
The radio iPlayer is a bit frustrating if you wanto listen to specific programmes rather than just streaming a station.
EG: searchin for "milton jones" doesn't reurn anything, but "thank you milton" does.
Having said that, the BBC is amazing and I buy a licence despite not legally needing to. The "in our time" archive is brilliant.
However I don't feel that particular pain point because I can currently access iPlayer directly from my Sony smart TV, my Sony Blu-Ray player and my Virgin Media Tivo box. I can also use AirPlay to send from my iPad.
Sadly, apart from the iPad, seeking is real pain. Want to pop back to re-watch something in the last minute? Bad luck - you're skipped back about 20 minutes.
http://time.com/18867/popcorn-time-is-so-good-at-movie-pirac...