An open letter to public-service broadcasters and regulators
The Internet and public-service broadcasting have more in common than they differ. At their respective hearts, both are built upon the principles of open standards and consensus.
When television broadcasting was born in a meaningful way, the use of open standards—allowing anybody with compatible equipment, whomever the manufacturer, to receive transmissions—was critical to its success: platform neutrality was key.
Nowadays, the roles could almost be reversed: people will procure whatever they need to be able to watch what they want. Theoretically, “broadcasting wars” could erupt, where each broadcaster attempts to push their favoured technical specification or the nuances of their preferred partner’s equipment, effectively competing with one another for viewers on a far less transient scale than they do currently. Of course, this is purely theoretical, because the government-appointed regulators ensure that the balance between the wishes of the broadcasters and the wishes of the public are kept carefully in check.
When broadcasters meet the Internet, however, none of this applies. Although the actual programming is more or less the same (rights issues aside) as that sent over the air, via satellite or across cable networks, the commitment to open standards wanes somewhat. This is understandable, to a degree: Internet-based programming is a relatively new field for broadcasters, and it’s taken a few years for them to find their feet, with the BBC’s iPlayer—clearly at the forefront of the medium in the UK—having to completely reinvent itself before coming of age.
The picture is a lot clearer than it was two or three years ago: usage patterns, bandwidth and other technical requirements, and audience demographics are far less of an unknown now than they were when initiatives such as the iPlayer first launched. And, while the regulator rightly—at the time—sat back and allowed the broadcasters to take the lead in terms of technological choices and implementation details while this incubation period took place, it’s harder to justify such a hands-off approach now that Internet-based services from broadcasters are seeing widespread adoption.
As consumers, we have little recourse as to the whims of broadcasters in this regard: broadly speaking, the choices that a broadcaster makes with respect to specific technologies are only held to account internally, with no wider value test applied. Where broadcasts via terrestrial, cable or satellite systems are held to tightly-defined open standards which can be implemented by anybody, ensuring widespread accessibility of services, the same does not apply to Internet-based systems, despite the fact that many of the standards relating to IP-based broadcasting and streaming have existed and had consensus reached for more than a decade.
At present, broadcasters make use of proprietary technologies implemented solely by a handful of large multinational vendors. To confuse matters, they do so while also making use of open standards from organisations such as ISO, MPEG and SMPTE. For example, programmes delivered using the iPlayer are typically encoded as H.264 video and AAC audio, but the actual delivery mechanism is provided by Adobe Corporation’s proprietary Flash Media Server, whose specifications and protocols are a protected secret implemented only by Adobe’s own Flash player and AIR software runtime environments. Unlike the specifications which govern the audio and video encoding mechanism, the specifications for the delivery mechanism are not available under RAND terms to anybody wishing to implement them, and consumers are thus beholden to the commercial decisions of a single corporation as the basis for their ability to receive programmes delivered by the iPlayer.
The organisations responsible—for example, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4—are not required to justify to the public their reasons for selecting proprietary solutions. The BBC has made attempts to quieten complaints in this regard through informal means by explaining that these solutions are necessary for one reason or another (such as to prevent piracy), but as the oversight in this area is an internal, there is no platform for claims to be consulted upon and responded to in a formal fashion, even though in some respects the facts clearly fly in the face of the claims being made.
Of course, care must be taken in this arena: it is not appropriate for regulators to being dictating technical standards all Internet-based video services. However, it must surely be the case that if broadcasters—already regulated entities—wish to make use of the Internet to deliver programming (something which benefits these organisations by increasing audiences as much as it does the audiences themselves), they must be held to similar standards in terms of broad accessibility as they are through other mechanisms.
One option may be that the rather than dictating adherence to specific technical standards to regulated broadcasters, the regulator instead requires that broadcasters make programming available to third parties under reasonable (and themselves regulated) terms such that those third parties may deliver the content themselves using whichever technologies they feel are most appropriate. The advantage and disadvantage of this approach is that it allows a free market approach to take hold, which while superficially would appear to satisfy the demands of accessibility, in reality it would only do this where accessibility and commercial pressures neatly overlapped, and it is for this reason that broadcasters are regulated in the first place.
However this market evolves, several things have become clear: first, that without the regulation that applies to over-the-air programming, broadcasters are willing to shun wider accessibility (and by implication, platform neutrality) concerns for various reasons; second, that the “initial development” phase of these services has broadly concluded, and efforts are now largely focussed on feature enhancements rather than major strategy; finally, that as with traditional broadcasts, Internet-based programming shows fantastic potential for changing the way that programmes are delivered to consumers, and the current lack of accountability and open standards should not be allowed to hinder the future prospects for this medium.
