Tumbled Logic

BBC, HTML5 video, etc., etc.

Despite everything, according to the BBC Internet Blog Delicious account, lots of people still don’t get it. So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

The HTML img element is an awkward but simple beast: it will either display an image, or it’ll display some sort of ‘broken image’ placeholder (in some browsers, this is invisible, but the principle remains): it’s on/off. If the browser doesn’t support the image, you’re out of luck. This means that, although many browsers do support SVG as an image format, you can’t reliably use it with img in your mark-up because lots of browsers out there don’t. Simple.

The HTML5 video element is different. It provides several useful features which mean that not only can you provide alternate versions of a video in different formats (and potentially — although this isn’t really supported by browsers at the moment — transported by different protocols), but you can provide content for browsers which don’t support the element at all, perhaps falling back to a Flash-based player.

As such, if you have the infrastructure to transcode videos into lots of different formats, the lack of agreement amongst browser vendors on The One True Video format isn’t a problem at all. Similarly, the lack of support for video at all in many installations out there also isn’t much of a problem. It gets even easier if you’re used to using JavaScript to embed your Flash player, because you can make this interact in nice ways with video to do codec detection (falling back to Flash even if the video element is supported, but none of the codecs you’re using are).

This means that, in purely technical terms, none of these perceived problems of HTML5’s video element are actually problems at all — the infrastructure for doing lots of transcoding already exists (iPlayer content already comes in many different flavours), and the whole setup is reliant upon JavaScript to work. Furthermore, if you’re using a “blessed” platform (I think exclusively Apple iOS at this point), the logic is already present and in use to switch to the video element to perform playback today.

Does all of this make sense? Good.

There’s a “but”. And it’s a big “but”. The reason only iOS gets HTML5 video while the rest get Flash is because there’s no “view source” on iOS. The perception is that it’s too easy to save copies of videos if they’re served up with HTML5 video to normal browsers. Personally, I think this is bunkum, but this is the BBC’s line on this, and so whether I think it’s bunkum or not is largely irrelevant.

For this reason, even if browser vendors did all settle on a single codec, the BBC still wouldn’t serve iPlayer using HTML5 video.

“Wait!”, you say (you did, I heard you). “What if the same level of protection was afforded to HTML5 video as it was for Flash video?”

The problem with this idea is thus: the only real protection which exists for Flash video is that the Flash player itself doesn’t let you save copies of video. This doesn’t prevent anything else from doing it. If you know how, saving Flash video isn’t particularly difficult at all (which means that, if somebody technically-clued wanted to download your Flash-based videos and put them on The Pirate Bay, there’s not a lot holding them back, except that it may well be easier for them to get those videos from some other source — such as the airwaves — instead).

While it would be theoretically possible to modify browsers so as to make it even harder for people to find video sources (and they don’t make it easy as it is — there’s no “Save video as…” as you get with images), of the browsers out there, the minority are closed-source (although the majority of installations are of these) — and so there’s nothing stopping somebody from producing (and distributing) a version of, say, Firefox or Chrome which undid the hypothetical obfuscation.

For this reason, the only solution to this particular stand-off isn’t a technical one: it’s simply a matter of mindset — the content owners and the BBC will have to accept that sometimes people will keep your content longer than you’d like, especially if you also broadcast it free-to-air; if they’re unwilling to accept this, then HTML5 video for iPlayer will never happen except in very select cases, like iOS.

A Note to Web Publishers

nikf:

Dear Web Publishers,

When visiting your site, the amount of time I spend waiting for your shitty Share This! Tweet This! Buzz This! Facebook This! buttons in relation to the overall time spent waiting for an article to load is the likelihood of me never visiting your site again.

No love,

Nik

</aol>

A brief note on the topic of the widely-reported “iTV”

(For the absence of doubt, I am referring to the successor to the Apple TV).

I have little faith in the long-term lifespan of TV-bound applications. Most applications are single-user, and a decent proportion of TVs are shared: this is a not insignificant mismatch.

That’s not to say there aren’t ways in which it can be useful. The bulk of time spent with a video-on-demand app, for example, isn’t in the interaction and programme selection, but the actual watching.

My hunch is that, if this is true, Apple is gunning for the games market. A cheap box plugged into the TV and capable of downloading and running games of a calibre that we see on iOS devices today would be a serious threat to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s casual gamer market segment — Nintendo’s in particular.

Perhaps the biggest factor working against this theory is that Apple isn’t well-known for significantly undercutting competitors when entering a market, but you never know (and Apple would no doubt claim that they were competing with Google TV rather than games consoles in particular, perhaps using the slightly flippant “if you consider yourself a gamer, you should definitely go out and buy an Xbox, Playstation, Wii, whatever” in response to the inevitable question from the press-pit).

One thing is for sure: casual gaming on the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad have left Sony and Nintendo in a difficult position. While iOS devices currently don’t really compete with the DS or PSP families of devices directly, the respective sets of games certainly do, and what the iOS games lack in depth and graphics quality, they make up for with very aggressive pricing (and indeed, I’ve got a few iOS games which blow some DS games out of the water).

The Apple TV is dead. Long live the Pippin.

A brief diversionary ponderance upon Flash

Adobe claims Flash is “open”.

Of course, it’s only open in certain senses.

Content providers such as Hulu, YouTube, Channel 4, the BBC, and so on like Flash. These content providers aren’t keen on HTML5 (pick a codec, any codec).

These content providers like Flash precisely because it isn’t open in certain respects. If it was, there would be no benefit to putting as many eggs as possible into that particular basket: there’d be no reason (at least, none which aren’t comparatively easy to overcome) not to use HTML5 as well.

The very openness which Adobe claims Flash has and Apple abhors is the selfsame openness which Flash lacks and is a big selling point of Flash into these content providers.

If Flash (and I do mean all of it, including RTMPE) were open to the same extent as W3C and IETF specifications, it couldn’t be sold as a solution in the same way. For exactly the same reasons, don’t hold your breath waiting for browser vendors to come up with a DRM scheme for whatever-codec-and-container-becomes-the-standard.

This isn’t a campaign for HTML5: it doesn’t need one. This is a campaign for a bit of honesty for a change.

The strange little man watched as the two women filled in the sizeable hole they had dug earlier on in the night. As they finished, he turned and crept away.

Vicky Sponge wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. So, that was that. She still wasn’t sure if her sister had talked her into doing the right thing, but one thing was sure: after twenty-five years of marriage, she hated James. In fact, she bristled whenever she met anybody named James. She was glad to be rid of him. She was sure her sister was glad to be rid of Armitage, too.

Armitage Spiker. World-renowned entrepreneur with a ruthless streak a mile wide. Well, he was. Now he was buried under several feet of soil with his sister-in-law’s husband. Mind you, as far as the rest of the world was concerned the two were on a round-the-world boating expedition and would eventually be declared, tragically, lost at sea.

The strange little man had seen it all, though. He didn’t think Louisa had talked Vicky into doing the right thing at all, no matter how odious and unpleasant Armitage and James might have been.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, there was a knock on the front door. Vicky answered it, to be greeted by a policewoman and a very small boy who looked like he’d been crying.

“Mrs Spiker?”

“No… that’s my sister. I’m Vicky Sponge.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll need to talk to you, too. I’m afraid I have some very bad news. I understand you’ve never met, but this is James.”

Vicky tensed inwardly. Was this some kind of a sick joke?

The police officer continued. “He’s your nephew”. She leaned forward and lowered her voice, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but his parents — your other sister and her husband — were killed in a terrible accident today. I’m afraid to say… they were eaten by a rhinoceros which had escaped from London Zoo and had embarked on a rampage through the streets of the city.”

Vicky Sponge was stunned. She hadn’t spoken to her other sister for a very long time, let alone knew she’d had a child. “Spiker!” she yelled, “Spiker! Get down here!”.

Louisa Spiker came running down the stairs towards the front door. “What on earth is the matter?!”

“Spiker, this is James — he’s our nephew. James… hello. I’m your Aunt Sponge.”

“And I’m your Aunt Spiker.”

A little way down the road, a strange little man was watching with interest.

Vicky instinctively glanced at the clerk as she signed the slip. Entirely predictably, a glimmer of amusement flashed across his face as she did.

“Go on, then.”

“Huh?”, replied the clerk.

“I said ‘Go on, then’. Get it over with.”

It was moments like this that she, for a split-second, regretted marrying James. Or at least, not keeping her own surname. “Vicky Goldsmith” was a perfectly good name. Why did she have to take James’ name without at least putting up a fight? Four months later, it was wearing more than a little thin.

James thought he had it bad, but getting called “Jammy” wasn’t that bad, really. In truth, Vicky thought he was secretly fond of it.

The clerk stammered nervously.

“You know what? I don’t even bloody like cake.”

And with that, Vicky turned and left, leaving the slip on the counter. The clerk looked down, embarrassed. He hadn’t meant to make it obvious. What did she expect, though? He looked at the slip, still facing the customer side of the counter, and chuckled to himself.

“ǝƃuodS ɐıɹoʇɔıᴧ sɹW”.

First principles of social media

Some simple guidelines:

Be honest

Honesty really is the best policy. And this applies to “half-truths”, too. Ignore this at your peril: if you conveniently skip details, mislead or misdirect, or worse — outright lie, then you will be found out, and not only will you look very foolish, but you’ll lose a lot of goodwill.

Be open

Don’t hide behind procedures: if somebody can get a piece of information by filling in a form or asking Companies House or similar, there’s no sense in not just handing it over. It’s easier all round, and — even if the subject matter is a little inconvenient — helps give people confidence in you. And, if the subject matter is inconvenient, the fact that people might find out shouldn’t be the prime concern.

Read/write

Talk to people. Have conversations. When people ask you questions, answer them openly and honestly.

Don’t feed the trolls

Personal attacks? Straightforward abusiveness? Just don’t bother.

Know when to take it private

Sometimes things are better dealt with out of the public eye, even if how the approach was made. Again, this isn’t about hiding things which aren’t convenient, but to save everybody else from having to read about specific ins-and-outs of a problem or where personal details need to be exchanged. Take it to e-mail.

Round-up

Following on from the BBC’s Internet Blog’s round-up for the week (featuring yours truly, at least in part), I thought I’d do my own for once. There may be some cross-over — most of the stuff I’ve been paying attention to this week has been BBC-related.

BBC Genome, Archives, Infax

The BBC has announced Genome, a project to scan, OCR and give structure to the entire catalogue of Radio Times past issues, with a view of building a database of the entire broadcast history of the BBC. This aligns with efforts to get historical programmes into the /programmes service, and would seem to be (at least in part) a successor-in-interest to the Backstage Infax Programme Catalogue prototype. All of this comes as part of (what I’m calling) “Archive week” at the BBC, which is marked by some interesting posts on the BBC Archive. This lets me sashay neatly into Brendan Quinn’s presentation from OSCON this year on the (near–) future of Ingex, and also Ant Miller’s post on the BBC R&D blog on the work at North Lab in Manchester.

HTML5, et cetera.

I have a feeling this one will run and run and run… but if you’re not already really bored of it, here’s a run-down.

I wrote a (nearly) line-by-line response picking apart Erik Huggers’ recent piece on the BBC Internet blog where he attempts to — for want of a better term — slates HTML5 on some somewhat handywavey bases. I wrote some other follow-up pieces before that, too. All of this stems from some head-scratching about the way that the BBC decided to get iPlayer content on Android.

It’s interesting, though. I re-read, with some prompting, a blog post I’ve linked to a few times in the past — Brandon Butterworth’s History of Redux, which does include this comment:

BBC TV and Radio services work on any manufacturers device, they compete on quality and features, not on exclusive access to content. It seemed silly to have to make special content for any particular internet device manufacturer but that’s how the market, governed by commercial rather than technical interests, has developed.

Entirely coincidentally, I’ve also been looking at the BBC’s browser support policy — this actually wasn’t to do with this ongoing debate, but in fact work-related — nevertheless, I came across this:

When considering which ‘Level of Support’ a web browser should be assigned, the following are some of the issues that are considered.

1. The BBC should provide value for money to the licence fee payer
   • Web standards are good for the web and meeting these standards offers public value for money.
   • Licence fee payers use a variety of web browsers. The BBC aims to provide the best possible experience to the largest number of people.
   • All license fee payers are considered to be valuable.
   • Some licence fee payers do not have the choice of using a popular, modern web browser.
   • Some people use accessibility tools - these people benefit greatly from web pages that are standards compliant.
2. The BBC should not, where possible, provide a service that gives a competitive advantage to any particular product or service. (e.g. we should not add to any page ‘works best in x browser’).
3. The BBC website represents the BBC globally. The BBC’s image abroad is considered to be of importance and, therefore, the non-license fee-paying users of the BBC website are also considered important.

Oh, and to cap it off, there’s this post from BBC RAD Labs on HTML5 and timed media, which I stumbled across for a second time earlier on today.

Lies, damned lies, think tanks, and journalists

Of course, it’s silly season. So we have Sexy A Levels and a post from Martin Belam from the olden days of 2003, both highlighting the silly ways in which A Level results are typically reported.

Meanwhile, the Adam Smith Institute published a… thing (PDF) which made for entirely predictable reading, and Steven Barnett rushed to the BBC’s defence in a rebuttal at OpenDemocracy. For the absence of doubt, the Adam Smith Institute commands in me broadly the same level of respect as Richard Desmond and the Daily Mail. That is, none at all.

Right, that’s enough for now. Back to heckling. Cheerio!

Critical Update!

I almost forget — actually, I lie; when it came to pressing “Publish” I had forgotten. I ran across this photo from Tom Bird of the End of Days at Kingswood Warren. Yes, that’s Brandon peering at a VT220. If you look closely at the big version, though, you’ll see that the terminal is plugged into a SunOS box, www0-rth.kw.bbc.co.uk, with quite a decent uptime and some very old files in /usr/local/apache. I have a suspicion this may have been the machine which ran the very first www.bbc.co.uk. Anybody confirm/deny?

Also! This week’s Shift Run Stop is out, featuring Reiner Knizia. This will be seeping into my brain via my ear-holes on my commute to work in the morning. Go get it, if you haven’t already.

And finally (I hope!), news has reached me that in a rare fit of blogging activity, Paul Rissen has written a splendid piece about News (capital-N, I think, is appropriate in this context). Hemmy Cho has penned a thought-provoking post entitled “Can technology be inherently good or evil?”. Both are worth a read!