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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.
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
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
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
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