BBC Begins Open-Source Streaming Challenge

bus_stopper copies and pastes: "The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment." We've mentioned this project before but this story goes into a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers.

Comments

Good old Auntie!

[jdtanner]

It just proves that you get a hell of a lot for your 125 GBP license fee!

John

Re:Good old Auntie!

[skaffen42]

8 channels of television

Even better, you can usually find something worth watching on those 8 channels. Since I moved to the US I have 20 times as many channels, and the best thing on is still British comedy reruns on public access TV.

Re:Good old Auntie!

[Shisha]

On the other hand, it could be argued, that many people benefit enormously from the BBC, despite not paying the TV license. Me, for one, I don't have a telly and so I don't pay, despite listening to BBC radio, reading the website etc.

My point is that by developing this code, _eventually_ and _slowly_ less and less people are going to have a television in the house and hence less and less people will pay the license.

Which means that the UK government will have to figure out how to finance the BBC. I would hate to see them deciding to sell it. It would be really unfortunate if this project marked the beginning of the end of BBC as we know it.

Re:Good old Auntie!

[Hungry Student]

I have to utterly disagree with you. After getting used to satelite TV ad breaks, moving back to BBC leaves me barely enough time to get a drink and get back to the tv, and I live in a modest sized flat. I think the BBC is fantastic, and if you've seent he volume of ads on American TV, you'll thank the BBC and the ITC for keeping the UK tv in check.

Re:Good old Auntie!

[Omni-Cognate]

It looks like the BBCs intention is absolutely not to compete with the likes of Real. All they are saying is that the license fees for the existing codecs do not scale, and that it will be cheaper from them to write their own. There is nothing in the BBC's remit that requires them to spend the license-payer's money on overpriced software they can more cheaply write themselves.

While it is true that dirac may reduce the amount that Real, etc, can make from their codecs, once again there is nothing in the BBC's charter which requires it to prop up commercial software markets at the license-payer's expense.

The BBC is not selling dirac. It is simply a tool they feel they need to do their job. However, they are releasing it under an open-source license. You may feel that this is anti-competitive as it undercuts Real, but Real et al are not the BBC's competitors. ITV, C4, etc are the BBC's competitors (though in an ideal world, the BBC is supposed to be about pulic service, not competition). By making the codec open-source, the BBC is freeing these other stations from the requirement to pay Real and its ilk. It is freely giving the products of its work to its most direct competitors, along with everyone else. This seems to be a very fair and competition-friendly way of going about things.

As for public service, a primary use for this new technology is to provide a huge, free, online repository of BBC content. This is an extraordinary project, entirely in the service of the public, which would be absolutely impossible for a commercial broadcaster to attempt. Whatever else people may have to say about the BBC's scorecard in living up to its remit (and I certainly think it's gone too far on a number of occasions) this is an absolute bullseye.

Go BBC!

[tdvaughan]

Another reason why I'm glad to be a UK citizen - every time I start to wonder if it's really worth having a 'public service' broadcaster the BBC goes and does something like this. I'm hoping they'll be able to make a stand when someone tries HDTV regulations over here.

Re:Ogg Theora

[Gilesx]

Perhaps because they are attempting to develop a broadcast standard codec from the ground up, which I would speculate would require different goals and optimisations to the Ogg Theora project.

Re:Ogg Theora

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because the trouble of making certain that no patented technology found its way into an existing project could easily become greater than the value of using that existing project.

The started with a clean slate with much attention paid to keeping the IP clean. I think this was necessary, any excuse for MS or Real or whoever to shut down or slow down the project should be avoided.

Do it quickly before Blair kills it

[NigelJohnstone]

There's a green paper due on the BBC later in the year. A pre-report has already been critical of the BBC's online activities, suggesting it does too much itself.

From an investigation in August 2003:
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publicatio ns/arch ive_2004/BBC_Online_Review.htm

You can bet MS (or Microsoft lobbyists the BSA) will try damn hard to kill this project.

I wish the BBC would stop dragging its feet and do it, start releasing the archive now with their codec, before the politicians kill.

Re:Do it quickly before Blair kills it

[dodongo]

Hear, hear! You're exactly right. MS and Real both have a very vested interested in making sure BBC isn't allowed to do this.

If BBC IS allowed to do this, then all kinds of legislative repercussions might go down on this side of the pond. I'm so dismayed with Congress and the FCC right now that I wouldn't be surprised if the MS - BSA lobby came over here, told Congress (truthfully or otherwise) about how royalty-free distribution options reduce the ability for existing coprorations and CODECs to make money, thus it needs to be stopped.

I wouldn't be surprised if BBC still had to license somebody else's CODEC to broadcast to the US.

There's precedent for something like that, with what they're having to do with their Olympics coverage. It's freaking absurd.

Open standard

[mm0mm]

This is a great news as we really need open standard codec for broadcast streaming. BBC is already influential in the broadcast business. Once their new codec is acknowledged by SMPTE, it's matter of time that the new codec will be used widely by media conglomerates in the US. It may take some time to catch up, and/or there may be attacks by proprietary codec providers, but open standards will eventually prevail (...hopefully).

As a non-Windows OS user, compatibility is extremely important for me. I'm sick of media contents that don't play but ask me to "update your browser/media player/codecs." Someone may think "proprietary technology" that locks in consumers is synonym to "business opportunity." Apparently BBC has a different opinion and doesn't want to swallow the pill.

Re:Ogg Theora

[Daniel]

Well, they said that Dirac is sticking to techniques published at least 20 years ago, so patents shouldn't be much of an issue.

Daniel

Re:The Future of Television

[MatSimpsk]

Everyone agrees that the BBC makes great shows, so why shouldn't we cough up a quid or two when we download from their archives? This alone would let them finance future programming in spades, and a direct link between consumption and payment is a much better business model than wooly license fees linked to TV ownership

It's those 'wooly license fees' that *allow* the BBC to make such great shows. If they had to chase subscriptions and/or download fees, the BBC would just turn into ITV. In fact, you could make a good argument saying that ITV would get *even worse* if it didn't have the BBC raising standards and expectations.

The licence fee isn't free money for the Beeb. They take the cash on the condition that they provide quality programming *for the public good*. Do you see Sky One campaigning to save historic buildings? Does Channel 5 show programmes telling us how to reduce stress, or do their programmes induce it?

Re:Ogg Theora

[gbjbaanb]

Divx gives reasonable quality at only around 1500kbps. If their quote is true then I'd expect Dirac to use about 4000kbps on broadcast video - so how does it compete with current codecs at all?

reasonable quality != broadcast quality.

If Dirac had a 'reasonable quality' mode, then you'd likely see it at 2000kbps which is getting close. They say they are still optimising it, so perhaps they can come to within a gnat's whisker of Divx compression.

Don't count your chickens yet

[benwaggoner]

Well, even if this was released, it's a real stretch saying that it's "only a matter of time" before it'll be widely used by US media companies. A codec is really only a small part of a digital media architecture. Some of the competitive factors that go into these choices include:

Compression efficiency
Cost of implementing decode in consumer electronics (read, what's the cheapest chip that can decode it)
Support for existing transport mechanisms (like MPEG-2 transport streams)
Existence of industrial grade encoders (like massive statically multiplexed encoder arrays)
License fee

The license fees do matter a little, but that's really a secondary issue. A more efficient but more expensive codec can actually be cheaper to implement, because the content provider can use less bandwidth per channel, enabling them to sell more channels over fixed bandwidth.

Today, the battle for the next generation "TV" codec is between Microsoft's VC-9 and MPEG-4 H.264. And that battle is already well underway. The BBC codec isn't far enough along to compete for the current generation of standardization efforts for technologies like HD DVD and digital cinema.

BBC Technology Sale

[awol]

I wonder how this project is affected by the recently announced sale of "BBC Technology" the BBC technology arm to Siemens. It is projects like this that seem to me to make the sale an extraodinary decision. Unless they are completely unrelated? Any insiders want to AC?

Re:Ogg Vorbis streams

[rikkus-x]

It's probably to do with your average non-technical person won't have heard of Ogg Vorbis. Joe Average has heard of Real. It's the format that "all the sites use".

AFAIK, RealPlayer doesn't come with Windows, so the user has to go and download it, trying desperately to avoid paying for the non-free version.

If the user has already downloaded it, they can cope with downloading and installing a player, so I'm sure they'd be happy to download and install something like Winamp, with its less annoying installation procedure.

All the BBC need to do is provide a link to Winamp, or some other player that can deal with Ogg Vorbis.

Again, it comes down to the brand-awareness. If they either can't afford or don't wish to run two streams then it makes most sense to use the one with the most brand-awareness.

I actually think they should stream Ogg Vorbis only and drop the RealAudio streams. Wouldn't that be cheaper in the long run? They can probably use the same hardware they used for encoding the RealAudio streams.

Rik

Re:Ogg Vorbis streams

[TiggsPanther]

AFAIK, RealPlayer doesn't come with Windows, so the user has to go and download it, trying desperately to avoid paying for the non-free version.

You're not wrong. But RealMedia is, unfortunately, a known quantity. Even people who don't like it at least know what it does and that it does what it's supposed to (albeit, historically, along with one or two things it wasn't supposed to), whereas many people simply won't have heard of Ogg. And I think this is what sways the decision. That and the fact that it's an all-in-one product. The codec and the software are linked, whereas there is no single official player that runs Ogg - and I do get the feeling that BBC Marketing/management/whoever might not be quite so keen on relying on Winamp or another MP3 player as it's main method of streaming.

I actually think they should stream Ogg Vorbis only and drop the RealAudio streams. Wouldn't that be cheaper in the long run? They can probably use the same hardware they used for encoding the RealAudio streams.

I agree with you. I'm just not convinced that whoever is in charge of the decision-making at BBC would see it the same way any time soon. Plus there's the whole mutual-advertising thing. Real does list the BBC as being one of it's news sources in it's "Real Guide" section - or whatever it's called. So people browsing the site after installing it to get other content might see BBC's name there.

I think it simply hinges that people know "Real". People don't know "Ogg". And Real and BBC seem to have a deal which is mutually beneficial. I don't think the BBC (apart from R&D/Technical) would really benefit from a partnership with Xiph.
I don't like it, and I do agree that using Ogg would probably be better on several levels. Unfortunately for whatever reasons Real seems to do better on whatever criteria the decision-makers use.