Still requires Flash. BBC continues its long tradition of epic fail.
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.
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.