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.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any). A more interesting idea, and potentially a big money earner would be to divide rights up based on target demographics. Not sure how well this could be done in practice, but I freel the idea has potential.
Why not get the real ultimate power?
"non U.K. citizens" .. so they check yo passport/citizenship papers in addition to your geographical location?
Damn that totally sucks.
Wish we had one world.
I look forward to any possibility of getting bbc programing here in the states. I think they have excelent programing, and only wish we could get the same quality for what i pay for cable.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Why would I bother watching olympic gymnastics on the BBC site when for only $9.95 per month I can watch naked gymnasts in streaming video with some uhh... "special moves" that the olympic committees frown upon.
I would kill for BBC olympic coverage. I just cannot stand watching Bob Costas for one moment longer. For God's sake NBC, get another sports anchor!
I don't have anything against the guy, I think he's fine, but when he's doing 80% of the coverage himself it starts to make my head swell.
What is to stop someone from using a proxy from the UK? If porn can't stop proxies, what makes BBC think they can? LOL.
With BBC Sport providing more than 1,200 hours of coverage on the web, you can make sure you do not miss out on your favourite events from the world's biggest sporting extravaganza.
I am just tossing out this thought. Most countries sign a "cease hostilities" agreement paper for the duration of the olympics. How about if corporations also validated the purity of what the olypics are and not limit coverage by advertising or broadcasting rights. 1200 hours is alot. If NBC thinks basketball will have a large viewing audiance, then black that out. But why black out everything from the internet?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
...given that rights related to the Olympics has shut down the BBC's normal international news feed, as well as Oz's ABC and a Canadian stream I found recently. In fact, the rights surrounding the Olympics is do draconian that I'm not sure I'm even allowed to make a post on Slashdot with the word "Olympics" in it.
All your nouns are be verbed by us.
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
Do I see a pattern here?
Streaming internet video,
---not available in the US.
Free-to-Air DVB satellite
---not available in the US
Cheap Broadband
---not available in the US
DMCA chip free inkjet cartridges
---not available in the US
Region code free DVD players
---not available in the US
Looks like Asia and Europe are quickly becoming the new lands of the free. Funny how all we hear about in the US is how oppressive it is outside our heavily guarded borders.
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.
In the UK, you don't have to have annoying ads breaking up your programming. Imagine watching Star Trek, Farscape, The Simpsons, Buffy, Angel, The Office, sports or even just the news without any commercial breaks whatsoever. The BBC lets you do that.
The average hour of American TV has almost 20 minutes of advertising. If you watch just 1 hour of TC a day, that's over 2 hours of ads per week. Now, the TV licence here in the UK costs me about 2 pounds a week, which is around $3 US. Wouldn't you pay $3 for 2 extra hours of your life back?
Whichever way you look at it, the BBC is excellent value for money. Six TV channels, about a dozen national radio stations, arguably the world's best newsgathering organisation, one of the best websites on the web, etc.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The magnitude of advertising in N. America becomes quite apparent when you watch the same shows in the UK. Star Trek TNG took an hour timeslot in N. America... running time on BBC2 was under 45 minutes. I guess that's one of the reasons why TV programmes start at odd times in the UK rather than at 00 and 30 mins past the hour.
The BBC is funded mainly by licence payers, not be general taxation ("the government"). It also gets some income from commercial activities. This is a bit "nit-picking" as the licence comes close to being a poll-tax.
In the age of the internet dividing rights up based on geographical regions makes little sense (if any).
In the age of the great Brusselian monolith devouring [formerly] free and independent states, I know it ain't exactly the fashionable point to make, but that BBC thang is [at least ostensibly] owned by [and operated for the pleasure of] the tax-paying British citizenry.
If they don't want us to see it, well, they're the ones paying fer it.
For centuries Americans have laughed at "backwards" Europeans, so bogged down in the trap of monarchy that they couldn't even keep up with American innovations. Halfway along, Americans invented the corporation, an innovation as convenient in managing people in our economy as it is constraining. Are Americans doomed to watch Europeans move past us, working past our corporatism, building on its successes for new heights of human achievement, as we surpassed our monarchial predecessors?
--
make install -not war
In the UK, you don't have to have annoying ads breaking up your programming. Imagine watching Star Trek, Farscape, The Simpsons, Buffy, Angel, The Office, sports or even just the news without any commercial breaks whatsoever. The BBC lets you do that.
Err, no it doesn't - The beeb don't show any new Star Trek series (Channel 4 show Enterprise), nor do they show Farscape or The Simpsons anymore, they have never shown Angel (Channel 4 showed that) and any imported shows like Buffy are always a year behind because the beeb only show the reruns, not the premiers.
Whilest I love the fact that the beeb are at the forefront of a number of very interesting technologies, their programming is absolute crap these days. Whilest they do have the occasional interesting documentary I haven't seen a good weekly science programme on the beeb since they cancelled Tomorrows World (whilest claiming they would be replacing it with similar science content that never appeared). And the last good comedy that came out of the BBC was Red Dwarf VI, which was *years* ago. (Sorry, The Office just makes me cringe).
Rather than being forced to pay the TV licence I would prefer to have the option to pay a licence for the services I do use (the online content) and be able to buy the occasional BBC show that's worth watching on a pay-per-view basis. Over 120ukp a year is just too much money when a large chunk of it is paying for content that I'm not interested in which panders to the masses (no, oddly enough I'm not interested in hours and hours of football or "Fama Acadamy" just because 99% of the population seems to be interested in them - isn't the whole point of the beeb to provide content which _doesn't_ pander to the masses, i.e. stuff that's not feasable for commercial channels to produce?).
The most worthwhile programmes I've seen on the BBC over the past few years are the survival programmes by Ray Mears, which are absolutely excellent but there aren't that many episodes.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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
Yeah, one hour of "24" is 45 minutes in Norway :) It's more fun to watch David Letterman as well: "We'll be right back" ... logos and jingles ... fades to black, and back again!
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
You see... due to the unique way the BBC is funded (In other words rip off everyone in the UK who owns anything with a tuner in it) this means that us licence paying Brits are paying for this (Admittedly cool) technology to be provided to everyone. Screw that... you want access to it abroad? Pay. As far as I'm concerned, you shouldn't have access to anything the BBC does until you've entered your TV licence number (Yeah, I know that's not feasible). Grrr! Sorry, I know this is a rant, but this is the company that will happily jail people AND fine them heavily for not having a licence.
The money, of course goes into massive director wages as usual and providing "dubious" programming for the masses (and now, not just for the UK masses).
The BBC are not as benevolent as people like to make out.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Interesting that only one program in your list is UK created and most of the rest either aren't on or never were on BBC.
A few years ago I would have agreed with your point. But as the BBC has shown itself completely unable to produce much quality drama, documentaries or comedy for a long time, something needs to be done to shake up the BBC.
They're still showing reruns of Only Fools and Horses from 20 years ago. The only decent drama they've done in recent memory was the one with Bill Nighey as the newspaper editor. The news coverage is going tabloid-style fast (don't get me started on the horrors of News24).
So this year it's 120GBP for Newsnight, repeats of Little Britain and Malcom in the Middle.
Does this mean I can get my weekly dose of Top Gear without have to load up the old Bit Torrent client? WOOHOO!
Keep Austin Weird!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/us/annual_review /2003/index.shtml
The BBC World service competes with other international broadcasters (e.g. Voice of America) and not with domestic broadcasters overseas. The whole World Service budget wouldn't pay for the cost of rights to broadcast live TV coverage of the Olympics globally.
Presumably US broadcasters have paid for broadcast rights in the US. If the service is crap well, that capitalism for you -- maybe US residents should donate money to public service broadcasters to provide a better service in future.
I'm a brit who lives in the US now. It would be really great if I had the option to buy a UK TV licence that also gives me some digital certificate that identifies me and that then allows me access to *all* BBC content.
I currently buy the BBC's international broadband news service, but I've been disappointed by the amount of content. It changes regularly, but there are only 20 or so news storys and a repeating set of headlines that gets really annoying after a while.
(BTW I'm a BIG support of the licence fee... if you had to suffer US TV, you would be too!)
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.