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BBC Releases P2P TV Client Test
evildeed writes "The BBC's Internet Media Player trial started today, and a few thousand lucky UK citizens now have a copy. The good news? Legal P2P downloads of quality shows. The bad news? Requires IE and Windows Media Player, and it's probably going to be UK-only. Oh well. One of the lucky few has uploaded screenshots and a brief review." The service was first announced back in may.
I don't live in the UK, do they plan to let non UK people get (pay) for access? Anyone from the beeb know?
They'll use current (imperfect) IP geolocation stuff like everyone else.
No, they wont.
I rather think that they will. I know because my wife works for the BBC and showed me a preview of the technology roadmap - which is now public, and so I can talk about it here.
They're using GeoIP to do IP location, Kontiki to handle the P2P aspect and (at the moment) Windows WMV DRM to handle the encryption and license to view.
I suspect that this is only the initial technology - there is no way that MPlayer/VLC/etc will implement DRM (and even if they did, they're open source, so people could just dike it out anyway).
The DRM aspect is for due diligence - so that the Beeb can represent to the content producers (often non-BBC companies) that their content is being safeguarded against the legions of pirates, who, err.. download the stuff via DVB-{S,T,C} and then upload to Bittorrent. In other words - the guys at Kingswood Warren [BBC Tech HQ] know fine that the DRM protection is ultimately bullshit, but that they have to make some good faith effort to raise the piracy bar.
Back to GeoIP: I tried going out to my (German-based) Web proxy, then back via a UK HTTP proxy to test whether it would work. And it did - proving nothing, BTW, except that non UK people will get access to this content anyway.
--Ng