Video streaming on open standards
I don’t particularly care for downloading the BBC’s TV programmes from illicit sources. I don’t even really care for downloading the BBC’s TV programmes from legitimate sources via unapproved means.
What I do care about is that the choices I make regarding which devices I can view that content on are not restricted by a single company, such as Adobe, or Apple, or Microsoft, or the BBC themselves.
I would, in fact, by perfectly happy with a streaming-only catch-up service from the BBC, provided the video and audio codecs and streaming mechanisms were built upon open standards which can be licensed by anybody under reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms. Note that RAND doesn’t necessarily mean “free”—but that’s not usually a big deal, because such (by definition fairly low) licensing fees are usually factored into the cost of hardware and software capable of playing back such streams.
As things stand, the onus is on the BBC to make things work when it comes to iPlayer. With broadcast TV, if you don’t get a picture, you can usually narrow it down to a problem with your TV, set-top box (if any), and aerial. The BBC can, on the whole, say “look, we broadcast according to nationally- and internationally-agreed standards, and if your equipment doesn’t work, it’s not really our problem”. They can’t do that with the iPlayer. There is no market for “iPlayer-compatible devices” in the same way that there’s a market for “DVB-T-compatible deivces”. If your device doesn’t work with the iPlayer, chances are it’s because the BBC doesn’t support it in the first instance.
The responsibility for making my equipment work with a standards-based catch-up service should rest with me, just as it does with OTA broadcasts, and if I decide that my equipment vendor really should support those self-same standards, it’s up to me to take it up with them (and up to them to decide whether it’s commercially worth it), or find some kind of work-around.
The situation we have now is one where the BBC is actually creating demand for illicitly-obtained content, because the transport mechanisms are proprietary, and so the only way to get content onto “unsupported” devices is to download it through dubious means.
There is no particularly good reason for this. As the BBC has pointed out in the past, the visible side of the iPlayer is a tiny cog in a much bigger machine (with due credit to the folks who work hard at making it happen, of course): it’s a layer atop a wider platform of content transcoding and delivery, most of which is built on open standards.
And don’t tell me that it can’t be done, because it can. The very fact that we have streaming for the Wii and iPhone demonstrates that the platform supports delivery through more standard mechanisms than the usual Flash Media Server-driven transport, even if the BBC would prefer it if “the rest of us” didn’t get access to content that way. RTP was first standardised in 1989. The specs for Secure RTP (designed for VoIP, but applicable here, too), which gives content producers a warm and fuzzy, if pointless, feeling of “protection”, were released in RFC3711, in 2004.
And if the iPlayer transport that we have at the moment is as small an operation as we’ve been led to believe, throwing another alternative into the mix wouldn’t be that costly, would it?
