Slashdot Mirror
BBC to Trial Worldwide Multicast Streaming?
An anonymous reader writes "There are tantalizing hints, via The Inquirer, and other tech news sites, that the BBC may extend its multicast streaming services to non-UK citizens, for material where rights allows. There's details about how ISPs may peer to join the multicast trial network on an official BBC page." We previously covered the BBC's multicast streaming of the Olympics, unfortunately not available in the U.S.
Posted anon for non-whore-action:
Quick scoop on multicast vs. unicast (what you are using now).
You can find out about what multicast is and what it means by checking out this Cisco page that explains what it actually is.
As always, Google is your friend...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Uh, isn't it obvious how they determine someone's location? They do it by IP address. Lots of websites have been doing this for years.
For example, MLB.com stops non-North Americans from being able to make purchases from its online store (well, it did when I tried it, even though I intended to provide the address of a US relative for shipping). And Apple's iTunes Music Stores use IP addresses to lock out potential purchasers from shopping at a store that doesn't cover their country, so that Americans have to use the American iTMS, Canadians have to use the Canadian iTMS, Europeans have to use the European iTMS, etc rather than whichever one is the cheapest (or, in some cases, whichever one has the tracks that they want).
It all boils down to distribution rights. The company that has the rights to a band's music in the US might not be the same company that has the rights to that band's music elsewhere, etc. The same holds true for television programming: the BBC has Olympic broadcasting rights for the UK but not worldwide, etc.
Mirrors? Well, we are talking about streamed content here so that's not as easy as it sounds, but neither is it impossible. However video sucks up bandwidth real fast, so if you intend to mirror streamed video content of the kind of quantity broadcast by the BBC (and that's just one broadcaster) then prepare to have a bill so big that even Bill Gates would double take at the cost.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
What is to stop someone from using a proxy from the UK?
I guess you've answered your own question... sorta.
Nothing is there to stop someone from using a proxy - but there's plenty in place to keep people from using proxies. If you spend 6 hours at it, you *might* find an anonymous proxy that doesn't include headers that the great folks at the BBC could recognize to find that you are in the good old "bastion of freedom" US of A.
But is that going to happen en masse?
Definitely not.
So, what will stop SOMEBODY? Nothing. Will it stop most people?
Yep.
For example, most proxies add additional headers to indicate who they're proxying for. For example, X-forwarded-for
So, in most cases, it's not too difficult to tell that: 1) You are using a proxy, and 2) You aren't in Great Britain.
As Scott McNealy said, so eloquently: You already have zero privacy. Get over it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
FYI, Band Of Brothers was co-produced by the BBC in partnership with HBO. So that's partially a British product too.
In fact, the series was shot in Britain and much of the cast, including Damian Lewis who played Maj. Richard D. Winters, are British actors.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Many cable systems carry BBC America. It carries only BBC programming, but it is not the same as any actual BBC channel in Britain. It is missing some popular BBC programs. For instance, it does not carry EastEnders because "70 per cent of BBC America's viewers switched off when EastEnders came on".
Just as a note.
http://www.bulldogdsl.com/
Offers a 4Meg line on the London Net system. They run a line direct to BCC, by passing BT(British Telecom). BCC has Bulldog and some other ISP's on 'safe' lists of IP ranges, but it's easy to route through other peoples systems, the problem is that the up on the stream on home lines is 400k. Enough for one stream.
I remember reading before the internet that France had some internet for their country. It was much like our gopher system in the early days of the internet. But everyone was identifiable, and they could remove useless content. I think I remember reading it is still popular and is in use. I wish I could remember the name of it.
minitel
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
iTunes Music Store has been availible in the UK, France and Germany for bit now.
In Europe we generally seem to get video games last (or never) as well though.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
It carries only BBC programming,
Well, apart from the odd Channel 4 (Faking It, Father Ted) and ITV programmes (Prime Suspect, 60s stuff like The Avengers, The Saint and The Prisoner) as well. Although it's mostly BBC programming.
It's a bit suprising how badly EastEnders does in the US though, considering it's the highest rated show on BBC One...
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
Not true. Well, sorta not true. On the BBC it's certainly true we have no commercial breaks within programmes, but the Beeb has an increasingly annoying habit of trailing it's own programmess as if they were adverts. About the only way it can get an audience sometimes for some of it's offerings (anybody remember the BBC Tivo hoo-ha a year or two ago?). It's still miles better than the commercial channels (of which we have ITV, Channel 4 and 5 on terrestial, and *many* more on terrestial digital and Satellite), but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed it.
Saying that, it used to be that the BBC broadcast the cricket (bear with me here, I'll not starting talking about LBW rules). Test series (you know, the five day matches that often end in a draw... Start your jokes NOW) were broadcast in their entiriety with nary a break for mother nature. Along came Channel 4 (focused on 'minority' programming, Oh, the irony to the non-cricket lovers) and promptly put adverts in.
Similarly with F1 coverage here when it moved to ITV. A heck of a storm kicked up: The end of the 'decent' coverage; How-can-they-do-it etc. etc. (Every change in this country is met with the usual conservative (note the lower-case 'c') pundits who suggest it's the end of the world)
But, the scary thing is, in BOTH cases, the coverage is IMNSHO immensly better, and dare i say it, actually better FOR the adverts, which are placed carefully (Cricket during changes of end; F1 every 20-30 mins with replays straight after of any important action). Certainly for my bladder, but it's nice to have an imposed break every now and then. Try watching Ben Hur on video and tell me the recorded intermission isn't good, and you'll see what I mean ;-)
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Oh, and "Period." is not a sentance. It's missing a verb. Unless your verbing [0] period, in which case there's a whole mess involving objects and subjects that you've missed out, assuming you're sticking to formal rules of grammar.
Alas, much as I would have liked OED not to list period as a verb, it's cited from back in 1595.
Oh, and for those who are interested, verb has been verbed for a while. The earlist citatation is 1936, from a poem, thus:
which seemed oddly appropriate, and a bit of a special case. After that the first verbing of verb was 1978.
[0] Do excuse. I verbed verb there.
Wrong. In order to get the stream, you have to be using an approved broadband ISP. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/broadband/info/providers.shtm l
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The Register reported on this previously. The limitations on access is not put in place by the BBC but rather by Olympic Committee regulations. The BBC is pretty good about its content and is probably more interested in internet technologies than most...
Morale seems good, considering, although high spirits are just no substitute for eight hundred rounds a minute
used is last night - 225kbs and it make the video stream look very nice - almost TV like. Unlike the normal 90kb or so I normally get which looks like one of those video phones TV journo's use today.
:-), but this sort of connection stream (>200kbs) really looks nice.
More people need to get this stuff going, it will really help people adopt high bandwidth connections.
Of course if they streamed in MP4 it would be nicer
Hi, I'm one of the BBC R+D engineers working on the multicast project.
:-)
We restrict the Olympics streaming to UK ISPs who multicast peer with us, and the participating ISPs have to make sure that they don't let this multicast down non-UK routes.
Sounds crude, but it's an incredibly effective way of doing it, and it avoids the need for intrusive things like credit card verification (which also doesn't work as well).
Sadly we need to be really careful about how our Olmpics coverage is allowed out, since it's a big deal for the IOC to allow us to stream it at all, and they have only granted us rights for the UK. The IOC tend to notice when people overstep their agreed rights too, so people absolutely must play nicely (you can understand that, it's their event, after all).
As an aside, the material itself is a really interesting test for the coders, and we hope to be able to supplement the real10 stuff with an H.264 stream (H.264 is the mpeg-4 advanced video codec) at some point. The tough part is finding distributable players which can handle this newish standard. VLC is a wonderful multi-platform player, but sadly only copes with H.263 at the moment, the 264 support isn't there *yet*. Quicktime won't know 264 until Tiger comes out, and Windows Media needs special plugins for it.
MPlayer depends on ffmpeg etc in the same way as VLC, too, so that's not an option- shame, I am too used to MPlayer playing anything I throw at it- the BBC's "Blue Planet" looked great in ascii art
Anyway, it has been a really interesting project so far, and we hope to be able to keep going with it, the results are very promising. Thanks for the slashdot writeup too, it's nice to have your efforts noticed, sometimes you feel a bit invisible in the techie bits of a media organisation.
-pjm
"Big Brother was on BBC 4"
Big brother is on *Channel 4* (which is an independant TV company).
http://channel4.co.uk/
You could search other nations universities too, not just American
Not quite true. Many of the larger players support multicast (Sprint, Level3, Verio, etc.). The big problem is that very few of the smaller guys, the ones that actually connect up people's homes, support multicast. AOL, MSN, and Earthlink certainly don't. You might get lucky and have a clueful person running the local cable modem network (DOCSIS 1.0 and later all support multicast!), and it certainly works for DSL as well, although my own provider doesn't even know what I'm talking about when I call them up monthly about getting it.